4 - Music Has the Right to Fans

Take a turquoise-tinted Happy Cycling trip with us deep into the record that made BOC an international sensation: Music Has the Right to Children

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Turquoise Hexagon Podcast 4 - Music Has the Right to Fans

Hello BOC fans and welcome to Turquoise Hexagon Podcast, a For Tune Telling series. I’m your host Elroy G. Biv. Each season of For Tune Telling highlights the work of a legendary musical artist or group and we’re first turning the spotlight on renowned electronic duo Boards of Canada. This week we’ll be looking at their groundbreaking 1998 debut studio album, Music Has the Right to Children.

In 1996, BOC had signed to Skam records and dropped their first non-self published release: the Hi Scores EP, a breath of fresh air in a scene dominated by jungle and its offshoots, and especially notable for the iconic tracks Turquoise Hexagon Sun and Everything You Do Is A Balloon. By 1997 they had begun attracting attention, with interviews appearing in German magazine De:Bug and on the Scottish electronic music site EHX. After a series of shows with artists like Autechre and Seefeel, including a performance at Stratford’s Phoenix Festival, BOC signed with Warp Records in early 1998. In an interview with Virgin Megaweb that year, the band said:

“Last year we started work on an album for Skam. Around September, we were also having friendly dealings with some folk at Warp. They told us that they would also like this album, but they didn't want to tread on Skam's toes.”

Consequently, the album the band had been working on would be published jointly by the two labels. 

Boards of Canada’s official debut Music Has the Right to Children was released on April 20, 1998, and was instantly welcomed both in hazy, pot-smoke-filled dorm rooms and critic circles. Sylvain Collin wrote in Magic Magazine: “Music Has The Right To Children is undoubtedly the curiosity of the moment. Boards Of Canada… succeed wonderfully, through complex structures, in generating gentle emotions and laying the groundwork for a form of musical experimentation held until now remote from electronic pop. Stunning.” Walt Miller of Faqt said “As their first full length release, the album represents a a culmination in the duo's perfected sound: beautiful melancholic melodies over deliciously crunchy rhythms that give nods to Autechre.” 

The cover of the album depicts an old family photo taken at Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada, the faces of the subjects blurred as if being only faintly remembered through a fog of many years - all covered in a turquoise tint, of course. The bell-bottom jeans and hairstyles suggest some time in the 1970s, which would have been during Mike and Marcus’s childhood. Are they among the children appearing on the cover? Is this a picture of the Sandison family? It’s not clear. The time period would be about right; there are also a total of four kids in the image, and Mike & Marcus reportedly also have two other brothers. Ultimately though, the liner notes attribute all “design and artwork” to the band and leave it at that, so we don’t know the source of the photo. The element of blurred faces would also go on to appear in the professional photography of Hexagon Sun associate Peter Iain Campbell and can be seen on his website.

Mike explained that the title “comes from a textbook for school music lessons from the 70s. It's called Children Have The Right To Music. If you swap the two terms Children and Music, the phrase gets a completely different, very threatening connotation.”

In what way is the title threatening? I imagine it as a sort of pied piper reference: the music will take the children away; maybe wiping their features clean, turning them into marionettes. But of course the band has always encouraged listeners to reach their own conclusions.

The record opens with the contemplative ambient vignette Wildlife Analysis - also the opener of BOC Maxima - the title fitting with the nature documentaries of the group’s namesake. It suggests long shots of a moose wading through a river, or a falcon circling over a gorge, setting the mood and leading the listener deeper into the experience like the piper drawing the children away from town.

Slowly, the easygoing, meandering melody shifts into something darker - hypnotic drones rise to the forefront, suspending the listener in a hallucinatory reverie for a few moments before the dizzying, twisting beats come in - percussion created entirely from chopped up recordings of Mike’s girlfriend’s voice. Visionary flutes reminiscent of Native American ceremonies fade in and out, and a distorted vocal sample comes in: 

“The holts are nearly always close to the sea

in fallen boulders, old ruins, and cliffs

all at the top of a stack, like this

High above the sea

A safe place for cubs

I wait, tense

then disappointed

She leaves her spraint to notify others of her visit

The holts are evenly spaced, about 500 yards apart, enough for the use of any otter who passes by, with or without cubs.”

This clip is taken from a 1983 nature documentary called “On the Tracks of the Wild Otter.” Mike mentioned in a 2005 interview that the theme of the record was “public information films” and we’ll see this theme surface again throughout. 

Right after this documentary cut, another voice, edited to sound like the narrator from before, declares almost robotically, “I love you!” In fact, this sample is from a completely different source, a Sesame episode, to which the band returns several times. The beat soon takes on a hip-hop groove, which continues for the rest of the track, punctuated by scratched and twisted vocal samples.

Out of the ether from the end of An Eagle In Your Mind emerges a child’s voice, stretched and delayed like you’re hearing time slow down around you, slowly spelling out “I love you,” with dreamy synths rippling underneath. This interlude, The Color of the Fire, makes use of what Boards of Canada described as a “psychedelic approach,” where they seek to mirror the time dilation effects of hallucinogens. Indeed, the band stated that the track was titled after “a friend’s psychedelic experience.” The vocal sample of the child saying “I love you” is in fact the same Sesame Street clip used in “An Eagle in Your Mind.”

This brief moment of (albeit somewhat eerie) serenity leads into one of the most intense tracks on the album, the dizzying Telephasic Workshop. Probably a reference to the Radiophonic Workshop, which composes library music and creates sound effects for use in BBC productions - again following the public information film theme - Telephasic Workshop layers chopped up speech and drum machine percussion to mind bending effect. Most of the words are unintelligible, but notably there’s a voice that clearly states “bordering Canada” at around 4:40, marking the closest Boards of Canada ever come to saying their band name in a song. I’ve heard it suggested this might actually be saying “Order of Canada,” and originate from a clip discussing the members of Rush being made members of the Order of Canada in 1996, and even though I’m a huge Rush fan, I’m pretty sure it says “bordering,” not “order of.”

Following is another interlude, Triangles and Rhombuses, in which BOC experiment with space and distance, in which the beat starts quietly, then builds, then retreats, and builds again as the melody seems to drift in from far away. Tobias Peggs wrote in Muzik Magazine, June 1998: 

“Nowhere are their tactics in tone and timbre more deftly executed than on Triangles and Rhombuses. It’s not the best track on this debut album, but it builds cleanly from their staple blocks, growing magnificently into a towering, hypnotic noise - yet strangely it’s always hummable.” 

An even shorter vignette appears at the end of this interlude - It’s Too Orangey, the same bright flute melody, reminiscent of a TV station ident jingle, that closed the industrial Twoism track Basefree. 

[End of vinyl side 1]

We’re then taken from this short intermission into another banger, the dark, unsettling, heavily beat-focused, and surprisingly intricate Sixtyten. Sixtyten is strange. It’s loaded with samples and references to other BOC tracks - the title itself references the number 70, the smallest weird number and the namesake of their self-run Music70 label.

Right off the bat we get a stuttering chopper-like sound effect that’s taken from the 1958 sci-fi horror film “Terror from the Year 5000.” 

Following on its heels is very much a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment: buried deep down in the mix right at about 29 seconds is a very short cut of the Old Tunes track “Magic Teens.”

[Magic Teens / Sixtyten comparison]

At 1:10 we hear a cut from the Colonel Abrams song “Trapped,” which BOC did two remixes of - one on Old Tunes vol. 1 and the other as Hell Interface. “What your” appears, run through a vocoder effect and pitch-adjusted, at 1:10.

[“What your” side-by-side comparison]

The Earth Wind and Fire numbers Getaway and On Your Face are also sampled throughout the track. And this leads to another odd moment - at 2:17 in Sixtyten, the lyric “I know we can” from Getaway appears, pitched up and distorted - and this is exactly the same time it appears in the original song. 

[Comparison of 2:17 in Getaway and 2:17 in Sixtyten]

Then we hear another sneaky Earth Wind and Fire sample: “Keep a smile” at 2:27 from 1976’s “On Your Face.”

[On Your Face/Sixtyten comparison]

Starting at about 3:30 is a backmasked clip from Sesame Street - the same sampled in BOC Maxima’s closing track Whitewater.

[Many me’s from Sesame Street / Sixtyten comparison]

Finally, Sixtyten wraps up with another little vignette, titled Blueberry in the PPL copyright database.

Next we're taken into the iconic Turquoise Hexagon Sun, laid back and melancholy. One thing you'll notice about Music Has the Right is the way the tracks lead into each other, with a sort of narrative missing from a lot of other electronic records at the time, which tended to be grab bags of standalone tracks. Music Has the Right was in some senses a compilation of odds and ends, taking songs from Twoism, Old Tunes, and BOC Maxima, in addition to some new compositions, but it has an undeniable structure to it, a cohesion. The bangers like Telephasic Workshop and Sixtyten lead into the interludes and slower pieces. 

Kaini Industries is another short vignette named after a company, Kainai Industries (it's actually slightly misspelled in the track title) set up by members of the Kainai tribe of indigenous peoples in Alberta, Canada, also known as the Blood Tribe. The company manufacture mobile homes, and was the first industrial project originating on any First Nations land. Tying back to the public information film theme, Kainai were the subjects of the 1960 National Film Boards of Canada documentary Circle of the Sun, which was the first on-screen depiction of the tribe's Sun Dance ritual, allowed by the tribe's elders for fear their traditions were dying out. Narration on the film was performed by Kainai tribe member and oil rig worker Pete Standing Alone, referenced by another track title later on the album. The track very much sounds like what you'd hear in the background of a grainy 1970s corporate training video.

After Kaini Industries is the dynamic duo or Bocuma (titled "Boc Maxima" on BOC Maxima) and Roygbiv. The updated title of Bocuma was described by the band as an "abbreviation/crossover of BOC Maxima and Documa, an obscure reference to 80's video culture." Roygbiv references an mnemonic for remembering the order of colors in the rainbow - Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet - common in children's instructional materials. and the song itself sounds like a tune taken out of Reading Rainbow and psychedelicized. Throughout the song we year the sample "lake" taken from - you guessed it - Sesame Street. One of Boards of Canada's most iconic songs, it's been covered by acts such as Lone and Sound Tribe Sector 9.

[Side two end]

The next side of the album kicks off with the hypnotic and hallucinatory Rue the Whirl, featuring a captivating hip-hop beat and a short melody that loops, over and over again, over the repeating rhythm, as though the listener is stuck in a time loop. Partway through the track the drums reverse, giving the impression of time being run forwards and backwards, with God scratching the world like a DJ scratching a record. The title may in fact be a reference to a recording from the 1970 Folkways Records release "Tony Schwartz Records The Sound of Children," in which a child describes God as "someone who rues the whirl." 

This track also hints at Boards of Canada's influence from Krautrock groups such as Amon Düül II (one of the members of which would later be featured on 2019's Societas X Tape Mix). Though the sound is obviously very different, the structure is similar - a repetitive and hypnotic rhythm, with slowly evolving textures shifting over the top. The sound of birds singing can also be heard in this song - they were accidentally captured when the studio window was left open during recording and they decided it fit.

Aquarius comes in next, built around a funky bass line from the song "Aquarius" on the Hair soundtrack - though this may be recreated rather than sampled directly, a common practice of Boards. Aquarius is strange and whimsical, seemingly designed to produce number-color synesthesia, with a woman's voice reading off numbers interspersed with the now famous ["orange!"] and ["yeah, that's right"]. (Mike said once that "orange" was most frequently quoted back to them). In April 2023, a poster on the Boards of Canada Facebook group, Garry Gale, wrote: 

"Here is a piece of B of C trivia. On 'Music Has the Right....' you can hear an American voice reciting numbers. That was Robin, a female American librarian on an exchange visit to Edinburgh. It was recorded in the basement of Edinburgh Central Music Library, where Mike was working for a while. BTW he still has my copy of the Incredible String Band songbook!!"

An interesting note about the numbers. There are three different versions of Aquarius and each of them have differences in the sequences of numbers spoken by the voice. However, they all have one thing in common: they start out with 1-36 in order. The sun of these numbers added together is 666.

Aquarius is also noteworthy for possibly including BOC's first reference to Discordianism. Discordianism is a philosophy, often described as a parody religion, based around worship of Eris, the Greek goddess of chaos. Discordianism was started by authors Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley in the early 60s and later developed by Robert Anton Wilson and Bob Shea in the 1975 Illuminatus Trilogy novels. One of its most well-known aspects of is a focus on the number 23, which occurs repeatedly throughout Illuminatus. The reason for this, basically, is that according to Eris, all things come in Fives, and 2+3=5. In a 1998 interview BOC named Robert Anton Wilson as an influence, and they'd later go on to make more explicit references to the Illuminatus Trilogy.

In the original studio version of Aquarius, the random numbers end on 23. If that was it, this could easily be a coincidence. But in the version they performed on John Peel's radio show later on that year, released on the Peel Session EP, the random number sequence ends with the voice saying "23" five times in a row, which is about as direct a reference to the Law of Fives as you can get. So this is the first direct flirtation with numerology on any of the group's publicly released work. 

This leads into the short and beautiful ambient piece Olson, titled after "the surname of a family we know." Later on in 2006, the Invocation video created to promote the Trans Canada Highway EP would be credited to Melissa Olson. It's unknown if there's any connection or if this is even a real name. Maybe this is the Melissa whose juice was referenced on Twoism. 

That marks the end of side three for vinyl listeners. The penultimate side four opens with Pete Standing Alone, as previously mentioned, named after the Kainai tribe member featured on the NFBOC documentary Circle of the Sun. A distorted voice saying "bonds"can be heard throughout, and once again referencing the information film theme, the sound of a slide projector is sampled and worked into the rhythm, conjuring up images of sitting through presentations in school in the 1970s of the brothers' shared childhood. 

Smokes Quantity, first featured on Twoism, appears here again and it fits in pretty nicely in its new context. 

Open the Light is a beautiful beatless synth tune, the title likely being a reference to the French Canadian expression "fermer la lumière" (close the lights) for turning off the lights - notably this is specific to French Canadian rather than Standard French. It gives the feeling of light flooding a dark place and lifting spirits. A good note to end on - well, almost end on.

The album wraps up, at least in its original version, with One Very Important Thought, where a woman relays an anti-censorship message over a vintage Boards tune, warning the listener that if they don't protect their own rights to free expression today, then books, movies, and TV programs could be banned tomorrow. The message is a re-recorded and slightly altered version of a message read at the conclusion of the 1982 pornographic film “Brief Affair,” in which the actress warns that obscenity cases against adult films will lead to censorship of other forms of art down the line. The message was actually sampled directly on the version of the track that concluded the BOC Maxima compilation; it sounds much better here in terms of fidelity, and replacing “the same people who would stop you from viewing an adult film” with “the same people who would stop you from listening to Boards of Canada” is a clever touch, casually equating the band’s music with so-called transgressive media like pornography.

The North American version of the album ends with the bonus track “Happy Cycling,” which has basically nothing in common with the version found on A Few Old Tunes besides a title. I’ve always thought the name could be a reference to Albert Hoffman’s bicycle ride on the first ever LSD trip on April 19, 1943; the album was released almost exactly on the 55th anniversary of the date. But it could just as easily be a description of how the track sounds: the beat churns forward like the pedals of a bike and the synth melody follows along, with seagull sounds coming in and out as the trip continues. The nebulous end of the track contains a reversed sample of Jeff Lynne from Electric Light Orchestra discussing backmasking, which was subject of a major controversy in the 80s, associated with the “Satanic Panic” hysteria - a hint of what was to come on their next records.

The impact of Music Has the Right to Children can hardly be overstated. Since its release it’s been hailed as a classic and one of the greatest electronic music albums of all time; it spawned legions of imitators, like all good breakthroughs, with even Radiohead taking a page from its book for 2000’s Kid A. in a 20th anniversary retrospective for Pitchfork, Simon Reynolds called Music Has the Right to Children the “Greatest Psychedelic Album of the 90s,” writing that the band reinvented psychedelia by “misusing technology to simulate or stimulate hallucinatory or ‘non-sane’ states of mind, and concluding that “with Music Has the Right, BoC did build their own world, set apart from the wider currents of late-’90s electronica.” 

As far as their own catalog, it represented an evolution and a refinement of the style showcased with abandon on the Old Tunes. Like wild magic sorcerers learning to control their powers, the Sandisons had taken their channeling of pop culture detritus: game shows, news, old half-forgotten radio hits, pornography, documentaries, and channeled it into a cohesive work. They gave it form, structure, beauty, even irony. For most groups that would be a career-crowning record. But for Boards of Canada it was just the beginning.

Thanks for joining us for another episode of Turquoise Hexagon Podcast. Next week we’ll go deeper down the rabbit hole of occultism, numerology, and subliminal messaging as we explore In A Beautiful Place out in the Country and Geogaddi. Until next time.

—-

Notes:

https://bocpages.org/wiki/The_Last_Secret_of_Pop

“Two other brothers”

https://bocpages.org/wiki/Northern_Exposure

An Eagle In Your Mind: Mike’s Girlfriend’s Voice

https://bocpages.org/wiki/A_Bunker_Full_of_Memories

Psychedelic approach