Obert a la Llum

from the LP Music Has the Right to Children, Warp Records, 1998



These guys are a very special group for me; they evoke sensations and trains of thought inside my mind that I rarely experience outside of ingesting psychedelic substances. Taking their name from the very nature films which inspired their musical direction (documentaries by The National Film Board of Canada), Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin are actually from northern Scotland. They began self-producing cassettes as teenagerss in the mid ‘80s, but it would be another decade before most of the world was able to start getting their hands on this incredibly distinctive and awe-inspiring music. Due to their reclusive lifestyles and general unwillingness to give many interviews, they have risen to near-mythic status among many adoring fans; to be sure, if you do a google search for “Boards of Canada” and “hidden meanings”, you will find all sorts of whackjobs insisting that the duo are, in fact, a cult, or belong to one, or some such paranoid nonsense. Both of them have a good-natured attitude about such stuff when asked in the few interviews they’ve given, but insist that cults, and religion in general, are just some of their curiosities which inspire their music, but not actual endeavors. It’s a challenging thing to put into words, the way this song and much of their musical output makes me feel---it’s almost as if you are in an IMAX theater, or a hot air balloon, investigating glaciers out where people don’t live. The vintage analog synthesizers & equipment used is integral to the bucolic and pastoral affect they create, and those of us in a certain age group will instantly recall the sound effects from such TV shows as 3-2-1 Contact, the Electric Company, even the sounds which accompanied that glorious spiraling rainbow of lights that capped any cartoon by Hanna Barbara in the ‘80s. Maybe that is exactly what makes their music so pleasurable and trance-inducing for me: they invoke the unyielding curiously and wonderment of childhood so well that you almost drift backwards in time…like a spool of Super-8 film, at times playing in slow motion and other times flying through time lapse, your life drifts in front of your mind’s eye, in that place where memories and dreams intersect, twisting into a whirl of surreal yet organic familiarity and recall. Extra points for the tripped out cover photo.