Music Has the Right to Children

You don’t listen to electronic music. I know. The word conjures a bloke in a mask, a festival drop, something engineered for a specific chemical state at 2am in a warehouse. That’s one thing electronic music does. It is not the whole of it, and if that’s your whole picture of the genre, then this album is the one that should break it.

Music Has the Right to Children is the Scotsmen’s fault. Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin, two brothers from Scotland, made it in a garden studio on the Pentland Hills and released it on Warp in 1998, and twenty-five years on it remains the most uncanny thing electronic music has produced.

Here’s the pitch in one sentence: it sounds like a memory of a childhood you never had.

That’s not a vibe. It’s a technique, and it’s worth understanding how the trick works, because the sausage-making here is genuinely fascinating. The duo built their sound out of analogue synths from the seventies — cheap, unstable machines that drift out of tune as they warm up. They recorded to tape and then deliberately degraded the signal, washing everything in tape hiss, wow and flutter, the sonic artefacts of old educational films and PSAs from their own childhoods. The result is music that arrives pre-aged. Your brain hears degradation and reads time passed. It hears detuned warmth and reads childhood, because that’s the tonal fingerprint of every dusty educational broadcast and school safety film ever committed to videotape.

And then it does something crueler. Songs like “Roygbiv” or “Telephasic Workshop” are melodically gorgeous — warm, simple, almost nursery-like — but they’re always slightly wrong. A note bends where it shouldn’t. A sample of a voice mutters at the edge of audibility, never quite intelligible. “Geogaddi” is an innocent arpeggio that keeps failing to resolve, like a toy winding down. The music feels remembered rather than heard, and memories are unreliable. You can’t trust it, but you can’t stop listening either.

The opener, “Wildlife Analysis”, is seventy seconds of tape-warped guitar and crackle and it establishes more atmosphere than most bands manage in a career. “In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country” takes a sampled voice saying “come out and live in a beautiful place in the country” and loops it into something that manages to be comforting and haunted simultaneously. Everything here is instrumental, and that’s the bridge you’ll have to cross — no lyrics, no frontperson, nothing to hold onto except mood. Give it ten minutes. It doesn’t need words. It’s communicating something words would only flatten.

You’ve felt this album’s influence even if you’ve never heard it. Every “nostalgia-wave” act, every lo-fi house beat, every synthwave soundtrack scraping eighties imagery is working in the shadow of this record — and almost all of them keep the aesthetic and lose the unease, which is the whole point. This is the original. It’s a warm bath with something cold moving underneath it.

You don’t listen to electronic music. Listen to this one anyway.

You’ll spend the rest of the week trying to work out what it reminds you of, and the answer is nothing. That’s the trick.