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== Original Text == | == Original Text == | ||
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+ | "[[Why Boards of Canada’s Music Has the Right to Children Is the Greatest Psychedelic Album of the ’90s]]" is an interview by Simon Reynolds originally published online April 03 2018 on the Pitchfork website.<ref>https://pitchfork.com/features/article/why-boards-of-canadas-music-has-the-right-to-children-is-the-greatest-psychedelic-album-of-the-90s/</ref> | ||
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+ | === Why Boards of Canada’s Music Has the Right to Children Is the Greatest Psychedelic Album of the ’90s=== | ||
− | Once upon a time there was a London vintage clothing boutique that lured customers inside with the slogan, “Don’t follow fashion, buy something that’s already out-of-date!” Some musicians opt for a similar strategy: Avoiding the timely, they aim to achieve the timeless. | + | Once upon a time there was a London vintage clothing boutique that lured customers inside with the slogan, “Don’t follow fashion, buy something that’s already out-of-date!” Some musicians opt for a similar strategy: Avoiding the timely, they aim to achieve the timeless. |
That’s what Boards of Canada were going for when they recorded Music Has the Right to Children in the late 1990s. At that time, the reigning aesthetic in electronic music was crisply digital, frenetically hyper-rhythmic, and futuristic. But the Scottish duo quietly and firmly abstained from these norms and conventions. Michael Sandison and his differently-surnamed brother Marcus Eoin came up with something completely different: a hazy sound of smeared synth-tones and analog-decayed production, carried by patient, sleepwalking beats, and aching with nostalgia. | That’s what Boards of Canada were going for when they recorded Music Has the Right to Children in the late 1990s. At that time, the reigning aesthetic in electronic music was crisply digital, frenetically hyper-rhythmic, and futuristic. But the Scottish duo quietly and firmly abstained from these norms and conventions. Michael Sandison and his differently-surnamed brother Marcus Eoin came up with something completely different: a hazy sound of smeared synth-tones and analog-decayed production, carried by patient, sleepwalking beats, and aching with nostalgia. | ||
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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. For many Brit kids, the sound effects and incidental motifs made for these programs by outfits like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop were their first exposure to abstract electronic sounds. Speaking in 1998, Sandison claimed that these theme tunes and soundtracks were “a stronger influence than modern music, or any other music that we listened to back then. Like it or not, they’re the tunes that keep going around in our heads.” | 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. For many Brit kids, the sound effects and incidental motifs made for these programs by outfits like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop were their first exposure to abstract electronic sounds. Speaking in 1998, Sandison claimed that these theme tunes and soundtracks were “a stronger influence than modern music, or any other music that we listened to back then. Like it or not, they’re the tunes that keep going around in our heads.” | ||
− | Another hauntology theme that Boards of Canada anticipated is the notion of the lost future. Again, this tends to be identified most with the ’70s and that decade’s queasy ambivalence about runaway technological change: On the one hand, there was still a lingering post-World War II optimism abroad, but it was increasingly contaminated with paranoid anxiety about ecological catastrophe and the rise of a surveillance state. | + | Another hauntology theme that Boards of Canada anticipated is the notion of the lost future. Again, this tends to be identified most with the ’70s and that decade’s queasy ambivalence about runaway technological change: On the one hand, there was still a lingering post-World War II optimism abroad, but it was increasingly contaminated with paranoid anxiety about ecological catastrophe and the rise of a surveillance state. {{boc|Looking back at TV and film from that decade, a lot of what you see was pretty dark,” says '''Sandison'''. By the early ’90s, when BoC were finding their identity, {{boc|all the sounds and pictures from back then seemed like a kind of partially-remembered nightmare. For us, it was a great source of inspiration. We couldn’t understand why it hadn’t occurred to anyone else to do it, it was a really obvious, natural thing to use.}} |
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− | {{boc|Looking back at TV and film from that decade, a lot of what you see was pretty dark,” says '''Sandison'''. | ||
Another ’70s-in-vibe obsession of the brothers is what they call “strange sciences,” that zone where the boundary between reason and superstition gets muddy: bodies of renegade knowledge and “independent research” such as parapsychology, Erich Von Däniken’s best-selling books about “ancient astronauts,” New Age with its beliefs and techniques concerning healing vibrations and energy-flows, and many other forms of quasi-scientific magic and mysticism. “I do actually believe that there are powers in music that are almost supernatural,” Eoin once argued. “I think you actually manipulate people with music, and that is definitely what we are trying to do.” | Another ’70s-in-vibe obsession of the brothers is what they call “strange sciences,” that zone where the boundary between reason and superstition gets muddy: bodies of renegade knowledge and “independent research” such as parapsychology, Erich Von Däniken’s best-selling books about “ancient astronauts,” New Age with its beliefs and techniques concerning healing vibrations and energy-flows, and many other forms of quasi-scientific magic and mysticism. “I do actually believe that there are powers in music that are almost supernatural,” Eoin once argued. “I think you actually manipulate people with music, and that is definitely what we are trying to do.” | ||
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− | == | + | == Highlights and Notes == |
+ | * | ||
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+ | == Screenshots == | ||
<gallery> | <gallery> | ||
Image:2018 04 Pitchfork screenshot.jpg | Image:2018 04 Pitchfork screenshot.jpg | ||
</gallery> | </gallery> | ||
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== References == | == References == |