Music Has the Right to Children is the moment when Boards of Canada – Scottish brothers Marcus Eoin and Mike Sandison – stepped free of the electronic underground and began their relationship with wider audiences.
The 1998 album wasn’t the duo’s first – 1996’s Boc Maxima, a super-limited release through their own Music70 label, ran to over 60 minutes. But it saw such a restricted physical run that Music Has… is deemed the group’s de facto debut.
Boc Maxima and its surrounding EPs, 1995’s Twoism and 1996’s Hi Scores, heavily inform this 17-tracker (expanded to 18 on subsequent reissues). Music Has… features no shortage of older material brought up to date – Smokes Quantity first appeared on Twoism.
But Music Has… is better than a mere summary-to-date of Boards of Canada’s music. It works as a brilliant album in its own right, past work reshaped to suit the pair’s (then) present creative mindsets. It doesn’t hurry its way through an hour-plus run time, but never does a track outstay its welcome.
These are deliciously down-tempo arrangements, which, when allowed to stretch to six minutes (An Eagle in Your Mind, Pete Standing Alone), lock the listener into a deep and fantastical daydream.