Do you have records or songs that are responsible for revealing to you an entirely new sonic world? A piece of music so different to those you’ve heard before, or so in tune with your head that it feels like it’s composed from the same impulses and waves? I do, and I treasure those rare but tangible moments.
Back when my obsessive drum & bass days were waning I was dabbling in more chilled styles of music and electronica peaked my interest, almost exclusively down to a Bomb the Bass mix recorded from BBC Radio 1. While it featured no Boards of Canada, I visited my local record shop (Rounder of Brighton in this case) and dug through their electronica section. This is where I pulled out the mottled green, slightly sinister sleeve of Music has the Right to Children, BOC’s first album for Warp. The write up on the front implied it was one of the best albums ever recorded. With such an accolade my decision was made – I took it home, stuck it on, and the way I listened to music changed.
The whole album is a sublime experience of hazy, nostalgic childhood summers – if a recording can have the aesthetic of Super-8 Cinefilm, this one has it. But the track that really stands out for me (and has done since the very first listen) is track 4: Telephasic Workshop. Unlike many of BOC’s tunes, this one is deeply funky and totally danceable. Like most of their tunes, it is wonky and saturated in glitch and ambience. Starting with a muffled hint of the beat and a pretty synth line straight from an 80’s school science program, the beat soon fills out with a heavy kick, an integral vocal snippet and a crisp snare.
Just as you’re grooving along to the shuffly rhythm, a strangely cut up vocal steadily fades in on the left channel, soon joined by the right. Increasing layers of male and female voices taken completely out of context and unintelligable for the most part stutter and splutter along with the beat. The resulting groove is perfectly programmed but still organic and natural. The fact that you can’t tell what the voices are saying makes you listen more closely and adds a delicate air of mystery or suspense to the track. I have a theory that such tricks are what give this kind of music it’s nostalgic air, the half-information without a definite source open to infinite interpretation reminiscent of a childhood state of mind, but that’s for another post!
Telephasic Workshop also features another of my favourite musical phenomena – that of the ’single, perfect sound’. Again, I don’t get this often, and for some reason it usually concens a snare (Underworld’s Pearls Girl has possibly the most perfectly placed snare drum I’ve ever heard) but in this tune, it’s one of the vocal snippets. It occurs but twice, lasts less than a second, is a kind of high pitched hiccup, and marries the beats preceeding and proceeding it so perfectly that it makes me shudder. It concludes and anticipates in equal measure. Perhaps it was a complete accident rather than planned production – if so, I think I love it all the more!
Once it’s established its dual hooks of fat & funky beat with stuttered voice samples, the tune rolls on for a few minutes before petering out to the original synth line. It’s deceptively simple but feels far more complicated. For me, it also feels ‘important’. I don’t really know how to explain it, but this and some other pieces of music somehow have a certain gravity or urgency that make them feel important (in a metaphysical way rather than in a current affairs way).
I still remember sitting on my bed as Telephasic Workshop floated to an end for the first time and staring open mouthed at the record deck. I had literally never heard anything like it. It introduced me to a world of intricate but effortless production that sounded at once futuristic and antiquated. It did away with conventions (admittedly inventing it’s own, but thats what innovation does) and took risks. It was playful but serious. Most importantly for me, it was the opening of the door to genuinely emotional electronic music, a door that had previously been nudged ajar by the likes of DJ Shadow, but Boards of Canada managed to push it wide open.