By the early 1990’s we had become familiar with the paradoxical idea of dance music that you couldn’t dance to. As rave ground to a nihilistic halt, the Warp label’s seminal Artificial Intelligence series precised a change of direction, it's roots deep in the eloquence/elegance of the first wave techno that had been originally crafted by europhile young black men from Detroit.

A new crop of erudite but homogenous thinking artists such as Autechre, The Black Dog, and Richard D. James each released their own seminal, idiosyncratic chapters of a genre then clumsily defined as "intelligent dance music". Dismissed by hedonistic clubbing purists as an inauthentic abstraction of their experience, much to the totalitarians' chagrin it arguably became electronic music's in toto approach for much of the decade. Most of the criticisms which dogged it's parent movement however remained valid in the offspring; a lack of soul, the creator seeking expression purely in a pacifist, instrument-free process which owed more to an artisan's skill with software than any degree of proficiency.

At it's most conformist, it was music with a prescient devotion to clarity, order and utilitarianism. Then in 1998 the release of one record deactivated a thousand of these clones at a stroke.

Marcus and Mike Sandison - they finally revealed themselves to be brothers in a 2005 interview - had begun recording as Boards of Canada in 1987, naming themselves in part after the documentary works of The National Film Board of Canada, which they had avidly consumed during a two year long adolescent stay in Calgary with their parents. Relocating later to the scottish countryside, the duo became part of a hazily defined artists' collective known as Hexagon Sun and then set about creating an air of mystique around their work which bordered on information fascism. All of their output before 1995's Twoism - itself only initially released in a limited run of 200 vinyl copies until a 2003 CD reissue - remains tantalisingly unavailable.

The brothers have given fewer than half a dozen interviews in the last decade and haven't played live this century. All of this tessellated with Warp's pathalogical devotion to the obscure and irascibly challenging. Following several releases on the uber cool Skam label, the people who had created the intelligent dance music framework in the first place then chose to deconstruct their own myth by releasing the brothers' groundbreaking Music Has The Right To Children.

Article Author: Andy Peterson

British. Thirtysomething. Passionate. Opinionated to a fault. Never less than everything. If you're at the edge of reason, you're taking up too much room.

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