“1969 in the sunshine,” from “1969,” is the perfect Boards of Canada lyric because they weren’t there and probably you weren’t either. I was two, and they were born in 1970 and 1971, so we were all kinda there, culturally. (Did you know they’re brothers? They are.) I’m not calling bullshit—I’m giving them credit. None of this happened and this is exactly how it felt. That’s how memory works, and also how Boards of Canada albums work. All of their ViewMaster clouds and scratched color negatives are born of the analog age, swiped right through the digital and then suspended above us in some realm that is neither here nor there. There was no hip-hop in 1969 but there was funk but neither one of them makes a BOC track move. Their rhythm is a beast that’s a bit funk played by machines, with the quietest hi-hats in town, if there hi-hats at all. The is melancholy as a physical act, a kind of queasy addiction to reviewing the same two year period over and over, both therapeutically and neurotically.