POSSE! YOU KEEP THE SPIRIT ALIVE! It's the 1990s ELECTRONIC ALBUMS poll results!

1. Boards of Canada - Music Has the Right to Children (Warp Records, 1998)
323 points, 16 votes, 1 first place vote.

http://i1326.photobucket.com/albums/u641/Lixenixen/mhtrtc-1.jpeg

One of my oldest friends became furious when I politely disagreed with him that "Music Has the Right to Children" was the best album of all time. He gave me a condescending fifteen minute lecture on how BoC was where "all art should be focusing at the moment." He smokes a lot of weed.
As for myself, I like MHTRTC. It's background music, but it's lovely background music all the same.

― Toby, 7. toukokuuta 2001 3:00

boards of canada are really good. i'd say classic, for distilling the one ambient track that's on every idm album and basing a career around it. that's usually the best song anyway.

― ethan, 7. toukokuuta 2001 3:00

Half the fun (not to mention the point) of Boards of Canada are the secret messages and hidden references that have been deliberately stashed within their material, and then wondering exactly how serious Mark and Marcus are about trepanning/WACO/chakras/numerology/Sesame Street. There's a wilful the aural equivalent of reading the Illuminatus! Trilogy I suppose, which of course isn't everyone's cup of tea; but it's their aesthetic statement - one of intrigue, information overload with a naiive facade - the wolf in sheep's clothing, the friendly stranger. The music is beautifully uneasy, simple yet complex. It's a bit like when I was a kid, listening to the news on the radio and being terrified that everyone I knew would die of AIDS or pollution or drugs or anything else I didn't quite understand yet; but also being very much attracted to novel or magical things.

― village idiot (dog latin), 9. elokuuta 2010 17:54

Whether or not you buy the album as a whole there's no denying how emotionally engaging it is for 'electronica', or how evocative of times and spaces. Whereas other Hard-Drive output fails, BOC succeed in conveying the sensation of presence (being somewhere/sometime) without resorting to the specifics. We don't even know where the sentiments are taking us, to a distant past, memories, regrets; or is it a muted anxiety about the future we haven't arrived at yet. For me the originality comes from their evocation of rural spaces, but this is not soley due to their analogue set-ups or hazy samples. They really express what it's like to be out doors through a love of the countryside, it's some of the only music I know that can compliment nature and fill the sky. So if you think it's background, fine but maybe you've not sat in a field for long enough. I formed my own opinions and loved it like nothing else for months before the Hype came down and everyone started scratching their chins, so for me, a classic, though it's not fair to assess them now. Personally I doubt they have anything else to say, the other non- album material (Happy Cycling excepted) confirms this, and their music doesn't deviate from it's singular trajectory, suggesting that perhaps they spent the whole of their lives until MHTRTC defining this sound. Surely they deserve Classic status for dabbling in nostalgia without an ironic excuse

― K-reg, 8. toukokuuta 2001 3:00

laaame

Nice bit of shit stirring there, thank you Tuomas.

Guess i should revisit it, but dont really understand the love for Insides, much prefer the Brown album and the first one for Belfast which was their peak imo. remember being let down at the time by insides their attempts at drum and bass style drums seemed kind of bandwagony and weak in comparison to what i considered the "real" d&b i was heavily into at the time.

Love MHRTC but really for no1 ?

Throughout the years, I've actually come to like MHtRtC. (When I first acquired it, the only song I liked was "Telephasic Workshop" because of the cool cut-up voices; everything else sounded like some lesser Black Dog material, and I wasn't even the biggest Black Dog fan to begin with.) I still think 310 reached the same destination via more interesting routes, but that doesn't mean BoC didn't do some nice stuff too while getting there.

Obviously it's not the best electronic album of the 90s, not even the best Warp album or IDM album.

"Roygbiv" is also amazing but in general I agree with you

If you haven't listened to In Sides on headphones, it's worth it. I remembering the listen where it clicked for me, on a coach trip, listening to the lead synths dart from ear to ear and all the tiny little details I'd never picked up before.

Sounds great to me on speakers too, of course.

But more than half of the people who voted for albums voted for it, so clearly it's well-loved.

(xx-post)

It is the 90s poll, fitting that an exciting and adventurous run should end with tedious navel-gazing.

Why so much hate for BoC? It's a gorgeous record. Have people forgotten how unique and fresh it sounded at the time?

It was like the antidote to the "tedious navel-gazing" happening in "IDM" at the time.

great work on pulling quotes throughout the poll btw Tuomas

For those of you who're interested, here are the full album results:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AiVOdCUDZoLxdDFJNU1nZzRlWUZ1TWJuS25MSVJwQ1E

ok that was some hyperbole, it's a good album, but you know what i mean. fucking IN SIDES! FREQUENCIES! HOMEWORK! and then this solipsistic blahness. it did sound fresh at the time but i swear to god if i hear another wistful downtempo album

i prefer zooropa

ok not really but i like "lemon"

How in God's taint did The Quest finish so low?

Being out of print for years might have something to do with it? I've wanted to get it for a long time, but I don't want to pay 50 euros for it.

at a guess, because you're the only person who voted for it

my theory is that if more people had voted for it, it might have ended up higher

Absolutely amazed that people still love the Orb that much. Next to any of the Orbital, Underworld or Chems albums it feels like a relic to me.

Awww, only two votes for DJ DB's History Of Our World Part 1, but they were both #1 votes. Only album I voted for, as the singles side of the poll is what interests me, but I thought it had a slightly higher standing on ILM.

Thankfully Clone is now compiling early, hard-to-find Drexciya material, though the compilation format is a bit weird (so far they've released two comps, which come in oversized digipaks, and which both have only 45 to 50 minutes of music).

ok that was some hyperbole, it's a good album, but you know what i mean. fucking IN SIDES! FREQUENCIES! HOMEWORK! and then this solipsistic blahness. it did sound fresh at the time but i swear to god if i hear another wistful downtempo album

― hot slag (lukas), Friday, November 2, 2012 5:40 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"Wistful" is not the first word that comes to mind with that record for me. For me, it feels like an exploration of bygone sounds, but in a way that highlights their strangeness, underlines the distance between then and now, and experiences the past as this sort of alien, almost queasiness-inducing thing. It's nostalgia as a trip, sure, but not always a happy one.

at a guess, because you're the only person who voted for it

― sug night (sic), Friday, November 2, 2012 5:45 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ha, point taken (though I missed the poll entirely). It's a shame their stuff has been so hard to come by for so long.

xxxp I still love The Orb, Chems or Orbital not so much. they are all relics though.

Well "relic" is subjective. Not sure how you can say they all are, unless you think all dance music ages badly.

Nice to see Flux Trax 2 in there. The first volume isn't an especially coherent compilation but it's an incredible seection of 90s greats, many of which I expect to see in the tracks poll:

http://www.discogs.com/Various-Flux-Trax/release/42195

1 vote for Hongkong and none for Biokinetics? Regretting not voting now.

for everyone saying so-and-so did the same thing BoC did 20, 30 years before, wtf are you listening to because i want it

1 vote for Hongkong and none for Biokinetics? Regretting not voting now.

― a panda, Malmö (a passing spacecadet), Friday, November 2, 2012 5:54 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's what I'm screaming... For me, those records (and The Quest) are TOTALLY canonical. It makes me wonder if a lot of folks who weren't around for them at the time actually haven't ever heard that prime-era Basic Channel and Chain Reaction stuff?

The font is terrible, but the MHTRTC cover image is one of the most perfect evocations of an album's contents in my library.

I'll note, as others surely have, that *the faces are bleached out* on it, too. That's not exactly "wistful"...

And the title is incredible, too.

monolake, drexciya, robert hood, maurizio, model 500...

i refrained from voting b/c i thought i didn't know my 90's shit, expected the results to school me. this list blows.

"or everyone saying so-and-so did the same thing BoC did 20, 30 years before"

This is almost never true about anything. There's one internet commenter who absolutely insists that there's nothing on Kid A that Can didn't do first.

Which Model 500? Deep Space is overrated imo.

Well "relic" is subjective. Not sure how you can say they all are, unless you think all dance music ages badly. Dance music ages great!, it has very pronounced cyclical returns, present in lots of forms of culture but especially pronounced in dance music, see the recent returns to organ led skipping garage house. wether the current vogue well get back around to dubby slightly cheesy tripped out ambient or rock/techno hybrids with liam galleger singing over top first is your guess as good as mine. sorry i actually do like the chems but those first two Orb albums a very nostalgic for me.

I was expecting Geogaddi to poll above Mhtr. In the end it didn't even appear! (fine by me by the way)

Out of all the various genre/decade polls run on ILM, this is the one where I've been familiar with the highest percentage of the albums in the countdown. There are a lot of records here that really opened my ears to various different sounds, not just the ones I voted for either. Something like In Sides... I was obsessed with that when I was 16, I'd heard nothing else like it. BoC wasn't my #1 choice but I'm happy with it winning.

I'm struck by just how little critical revision of the 90s consensus has occured so far - this list could have been picked from any number of contemporaneous review sites, and there really isn't a single surprise (aside from the St. Etienne showing by indie diehards).

Geogaddi came out in 2002.

Ah, good point.

are you happy with the results, tuomas?

I think most of the critical revisionism of 90s dance - to the extent it has been going on - has been focused on areas which are more tracks-focused than albums-focused.

This list seems depressingly boring to me but I suppose that was inevitable.

are you happy with the results, tuomas?

There are some good albums there, no doubt. But like I said a while ago, I'm surprised how very, very Brit-centric the list is: 41 out of the top 50 albums come from the UK. As someone who was listening to a lot of German techno in the 90s, I'm a bit disappointed it's represented by only three albums, all of which may be there because the artists behind them (Voigt, Burger, Basic Channel) became more hip in the 00s than they were in the 90s. (They're all great albums though, don't get me wrong.) My number 1 album (Air Liquide's Nephology) is German, and no one else voted for it... :( An equal disappointment is that all of American dance music is represented by Carl Craig alone.

I'm sure there were some interesting / original choices in people's lists. It's just when you put them all together, more often than not, the old favourites get hashed out.

I still listen to the Orb today, though Orbus Terrarum is my pick for the one that held up the best

i refrained from voting b/c i thought i didn't know my 90's shit, expected the results to school me. this list blows.

yea i am starting to wish i voted regardless of my level of expertise. i understand that it'd be annoying to split hairs over various strains of '90s electronic stuff but this sorta feels pointless

seems like ambient/idm stuff is pretty unavoidable in the general '90s canon, we all have heard or know that we don't want to hear those albums by now, but dance stuff is still p underrepresented outside of obvious stuff like daft punk/prodigy/basement jaxx. tho tim is otm about 90s dance being more about tracks than albums

happy to see landcruising/paperclip people/burger/ink show up. more annoyed than ever at ilx's undying love for autechre