Why boards of canada

Everything the Scottish pairing placing their name against is carefully considered, and their distinctive retro-futurist tint is drained through this intriguing remix. Acclaimed art duo BrainTwins - Jessica Dunn and Justin Shimp - have stepped in to work on the visuals, and their multi-media style perfectly matches the distorted electronic psychedelia that Boards Of Canada specialise in. For all the latest WHY?

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To my child-mind, wholly uninterested in urban thrills and temptations, it seemed like you could never get—forgive me—bored of Canada.

As youngsters, Sandison and Eoin were lucky enough to live in the prairie province of Alberta for a few years, when their parents worked in the construction industry there. The album contains a profusion of allusions to Nature, and some actual sounds taken from the great outdoors. But the biggest psychedelia-flashback element to Music Has the Right is its cult of childhood.

And BoC have indeed been genre-ative, creating a style of music in their own image. Glazed and diffused is pretty much how I felt when I first fell deep for, and deep into, Music Has the Right.

The album had bypassed me initially: as a jungle fanatic, my metabolism was wired to the frantic futurism of breakbeat science. But something drew me back several months later—perhaps testimonials from others, or a gathering sense of its reputation.

And that time around, Music Has the Right took over my life for a good while. Like many others, I found that Music Has the Right had an extraordinary power to trigger memories. But in a far more profound, fundamental, and deeply mysterious way, BoC seemed to be tapping into those deepest recesses of personal memory.

That was their gift to the listener. But where Bush of Ghosts , with its Arabic singers and Born Again preachers, worked through an exoticism of geography and cultural distance, Music Has the Right involved an exoticism of time. They carried no particular emotional charge, but they were numinous with significance, akin to the way dream images can linger long into your waking hours, without ever revealing anything as legible as a meaning.

Music Has the Right , in fact, was like a dream you could turn on at will. As much as Boards of Canada harked back to Bush of Ghosts , they also harked forward to Ghost Box, the British label whose ectoplasmic sound and elegiac sensibility has come to define the 21st-century genre known as hauntology.

Among the many common concerns, a nostalgic fascination for television stands out as the major connection. In between this creepy fare, young eyes were regularly assaulted by Public Information Films, a genre of short British programs made for TV broadcast and ostensibly designed to educate and advise, but which often seemed to be scripted and directed by child-hating sadists whose true goal was to increase nightmares and bed-wetting.

The unsettling content of all this vintage kids-oriented TV seeped into the brains of Sandison and Eoin at a vulnerable age.

But what seems to have lingered even more insidiously in the memory of BoC, and the hauntologists that came after them, is the music. And while both of those acts and others on the UK imprint's seminal roster counted electro and b-boy styles among their influences, the end result increasingly felt far removed in practice if not in heady concept. Revisiting notable oldies now like "Kid For Today" and "Turquoise Hexagon Sun"—as one does when one of their favorite artists hasn't released a new album in nearly a decade—makes their casual omission all the more glaring.

Where so-called trip-hop producers and their fairly repulsive chill-hop descendent mutants so often lose the plot as to what fundamentally makes hip-hop great, these relatively ancient songs warble and throb like some of the best boombox fare. Their Eno-esque ambient excursions and pastoral psych leanings aside, you'd be hard pressed to find something as rugged as "Roygbiv" or "Sunshine Recorder" in your favorite DJ's proverbial crates. But their willfully obscured artistic ethos and cultish admiration from fans perhaps ought to put them very much in the same camp.

While there's good reason to be mindful about giving too much credit to white producers in instrumental hip-hop, they at least deserve the same exceptional considerations granted to Def Jukies El-P, Blockhead, and RJD2.

You have got to give this New York rapper credit just for drawing any inspiration from the titular Spike Jonze x Charlie Kaufman feature. While not the first time YL has borrowed from cinema, Adaptation feels roughly as ambitious as a short film, his well-executed rhymes and gratuitous ad libs filling up this concise follow-up to this summer's It Never Entered My Mind.