Page-Turner Tunes: Boards of Canada’s “Music Has the Right to Children”

About a week and a half ago, on the eve of the new year, the Big Picture podcast posted the final episode of its 2025 series on the top twenty-five movies of the century so far. Number one turned out to be David Fincher’s The Social Network (sure, I can respect it), and as part of the discussion, the hosts turned to the film’s iconic score, from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. “Many years ago,” Sean Fennessey said, “I described the score as the ultimate writing-to music.”

I tip my hat to you, Sean. It’s always nice to feel like someone’s on your page. Lofi Girl is fine, but there was a time before its endless trough of undifferentiated background beats when we had to curate our own focus music. Since 2011 or so, I’ve personally had an ongoing playlist simply titled “Stuff for Editing,” where I’ve amassed more than seven hours of film scores, instrumental prog rock, jazz and classical standards, and more (and yes, the Social Network score is on there). The lyricless albums got me through many a workday writing, skimming, and cutting 1,000-word corporate profiles, back when I was still an editor, and I still use them for coding and for reading at home.

As I continue to figure out what this blog is, I thought it might be fun to kick off a series on what’s on my playlist. Maybe it’ll help you find something new. Maybe you’ll have something new to turn me on to. Regardless, it’s something regular to write about related to this project. And the first album I’d like to discuss is Boards of Canada’s debut record, Music Has the Right to Children.

The band is a dual act comprising brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin, and I struggle to describe their sound on this album and subsequent releases. Electronica, yes. Trip hop, yes. But I’m not an expert with deep knowledge of those genres, and citing them doesn’t get at the actual vibe of the music, which doesn’t sound like other electronica I know. It’s like a composer of late 1970s / early 1980s nature documentaries dropped acid and found a drum machine and a loop sampler. People of a certain age (elder millennials and younger Gen Xers, at the very least) are likely to hear the album’s eerie, modulated vintage synths and call to mind distant memories of old PBS intros played in school on VHS on behemoth cathode-ray TVs rolled into the classroom on A/V carts.

This probably isn’t far off from the band’s actual influences. Simon Reynolds’s in-depth Pitchfork essay on the album, from 2018, notes that their name is derived from the National Film Board of Canada, a producer of films for the country’s own public television. The brothers took inspiration from “their ‘grainy and wobbly’ look, and from the music: electronic under-scores and themes largely made by the Quebecois composer Alain Clavier.” And the occasional voice samples on the album come largely from public-TV programming as well, including Sesame Street.

But you can read the album’s Wikipedia article if you want more background on the production. I’m more interested in how the music makes me feel. It’s so specifically localized to the educational films of my own school years that it is, for me, a nostalgia bomb roughly a thousand times more powerful than ones explicitly manufactured for the purpose, like, say, the Stranger Things intro.

“Everyone used to have drawers full of unique cassettes with old snippets from radio and TV, it’s kind of a lost thing now, sadly,” Eoin says in Reynolds’s piece. “To me, it’s fascinating and precious to find some lost recordings in a cupboard, so part of it was an idea to create new music that really felt like an old familiar thing.”

The music in turn opens up the cupboards of the listeners mind, where fragments of memory lie, waiting to be discovered afresh. As a high schooler in small-town Iowa, in autumn, I’d often go for walks at night that took me to the edge of town, where the wind off the fields would blow in my face as I looked out at the red lights of a far-off antenna tower blinking in the countryside, like a distant space station. Something about MHtRtC reminds me of the sensation of that experience, even though I didn’t find the album until several years later.

I’ve been giving it some fresh spins lately as I work my way through Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, a quirky 1987 comedy/mystery about programming, ghosts, and travels through time and space. And if you’ve ever seen even the intro to the 1981 BBC adaptation of Adams’s more famous novel, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you’ll understand how MHtRtC pairs with his work pretty much perfectly.

I imagine it would be a good accompaniment to most science fiction, really, given that it feels both retro and future-facing at once. Crack a paperback, throw it on, and decide for yourself.