Features

Boards of Canada :: Music Has The Right To Children (Warp/Skam) — [flashback]

Boards of Canada’s Music Has the Right to Children stands as a quintessential cornerstone of downtempo electronic music—a seminal release that propelled the enigmatic duo of Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin into a boundless realm of nostalgic reverie. In this edition of our “Flashback” column, Anne Jackson revisits the album’s haunting landscapes, with particular focus on “Telephasic Workshop,” a track that encapsulates a paradoxical beauty: at once claustrophobic and transcendent in its sonic intricacy.

Juan Atkins, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson :: Detroit Techno — [flashback]

In this [Flashback] column, Anne Jackson explores the origins of Detroit Techno, a genre born in the early 1980s from the city’s underground dance scene. Pioneered by African-American artists Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson—collectively known as the Belleville Three—techno fused elements of funk, electro, and early electronic music. Shaped by Detroit’s industrial backdrop and the socio-economic challenges facing its residents, the genre became both a form of artistic innovation and a powerful outlet for expression within the African-American community.

Anna Homler :: Reverie (Right Brain)

Reverie is a tour of unadorned castles in the air, playful and strange vocals, music inspiring pleasant dream-like thoughts, expressed with wordless musical vocalisms, fluid speech-like syllables that might lack any readily comprehensible meaning, an extravagant conceit of the imagination, a lost sense of dreaming while awake. There is an extraordinary array of great talent here.

Scanner & Nurse With Wound :: Contrary Motion (Alltagsmusik / United Dairies)

Contrary Motion is an album for those who wish to embark on a journey of neurodivergence from the realm of traditional thought and soundwaves so as to access the remedies that will give them relief from the complexity of modern life. This is live audio that has been refracted through the studio by means of frequency hopping between Australia, Ireland and England.