Boards of Canada: Music Has the Right to Children (2LP) [WARP]

Why you'll love it

Music Has the Right to Children is one of the most influential electronic albums ever made, a fixture on Pitchfork and Mojo best-ever lists. "Roygbiv," "Aquarius" and "Telephasic Workshop" still sound like nothing else.

This edition

• 2LP set, 18 tracks
• Warp pressing
• Gatefold sleeve

About the album

Say this for brothers Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin: they've never been in a hurry. They'd been making music together since the early '80s, layering synths over cassette recordings of shortwave radio, and spent most of the '90s tucked away in the Pentland Hills outside Edinburgh with their Hexagon Sun collective before Warp finally coaxed a proper album out of them in April of 1998.

Music Has the Right to Children was worth the wait. It's built from vintage synthesizers, deliberately degraded analogue tape, found sounds and lazy, hip-hop-inspired beats, and the whole thing sounds like a nature documentary half-remembered from a 1970s classroom (in a good way, mostly). "Roygbiv," "Aquarius" and "Turquoise Hexagon Sun" are the ones everyone knows, but it really works best as one long, woozy drift. Countless artists have tried to bottle this sound since. Nobody's quite managed it.

Also at Kops: more Boards of Canada on vinyl · browse Electronic

Tracklist

Listen

On Warp (cat# WARPLP55R), first out in 1998.