Boards Of Canada, Music Has The Right To Children

It's that full-body twitch that jolts you awake when you're drifting off to sleep, sometimes. It's the way the heat from a bonfire will create a rippling mirage that's still visible during dusk on the beach. It's the word dappled. It's that brief flash of anything-is-possible, anacreontic euphoria when you're getting drunk, before the intoxication crests and you tumble down the other side, sweaty and stumbling. It's the slow drift of your car from one lane into another when your tires aren't perfectly aligned. It's driving through Iowa at the end of July. It's the graceful apocalypse of an ice shelf fracturing off and lowering itself into the water. It's the slow sink and bounce of Neil Armstrong as he descends from Apollo 11.

It's the hallucination of falling out of the dentist's chair as the nitrous oxide kicks in and the room feels like it's inverting. It's the way your eyes can focus and defocus on a nighttime cityscape so that the lights, in all their varied intensities and colors, go from fine points to small novas and back again. It's the way a pine forest looks from the ground, lying on a bed of needles and looking straight up into the canopy of trees. It's the bucolic haze of "Turquoise Hexagon Sun".

It's crossing the Iowa River on the Burlington Street bridge in my car three years ago and hearing "Roygbiv" for the first time, on KRUI, not knowing what the hell it is, being instantly enamored and also a little creeped out. It's Stonehenge on a rainy November afternoon. It's the morning walk up Hoyne to the train. It's the slow crawl of headlights along the walls of a darknened room. It's an out-of-tune upright piano in a small decrepit cabin in the middle of the woods in Colorado.

It's the perverted, terrifying, and endearing "children's chorus" on "Aquarius" and most of the other songs here. It's a single ray of sunlight penetrating a mine shaft as "Bocuma" glides overhead. It's the swirl and sway of "Roygbiv"'s Moog. It's the disturbed equilibrium, the unpredictable square wave of an analog synth. It's driving along Pilgrim Highway to the lighthouse at Point Betsie, long after midnight, with cheap wine in the trunk. It's the caustic swoop of "Rue The World", the brief soporific reprieve offered by "Olson". It's lying on the grass at the high school, watching the fireworks. It's the hell-spawned national anthem "Open The Light", phasing back and forth between the channels of your headphones. It's the incongruity of the bizarro public service announcement, "One Very Important Thought" and the optimistic send-off, "Happy Cycling".

It's the mirrored windows of skyscrapers that catch the sun and glare back at you. It's the quiet dignity of a small cemetary in the country. It's the tollway oasis at three a.m. It's muted chords played on a broken-down Rhodes piano. It's a space station's slowly rotating gyroscope. It's the geometric elegance of fractals. It's the diffuse character that June sunlight adopts during a mid-afternoon gin-and-tonic buzz. It's walking home on that same buzz with the sun still too high in its arc, collapsing into bed and sleeping until it's dark out, then getting back up and doing it all over again.

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