I was wrong, and I've rarely been wronger. I recently experienced one of my periodic bursts of canonicity, wherein I was compelled to download the relevant albums by three hipster superstars: Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada and Godspeed You! Black Emperor (more on those clowns later.) My memories of the music of all three were hazy and distant, but my official opinion on BoC in particular had stood the test of time: they were sickly insipid pablum, limp beats atop Yanni synths with the constant undercurrent of children at play, right? Like Jon Hopkins remixing post-Ágætis byrjun Sigur Rós. That's what HAI insisted they were - the most offensively white and undanceable of the IDM vanguard. But then I actually listened to Music Has the Right to Children again for the first time in a decade and... this shit's hip hop. Like somehow this whole time, Boreds of Canaduh (haw haw) aren't just not IDM by the normal genre definitions, they're not even EDM! Seriously, if that album had been released in this decade, it would have an "Instrumental Hip Hop" primary genre and maybe "Experimental Hip Hop" or "Lo Fi Hip Hop" as secondary. Those are gotdang boom bap beats, and they're kinda bangin'! Autechre are always hyping their rap influence through mixes and such but this is way more obvious than on any of their work. And it's actually really good! They take a small number of disparate influences (90s hip hop and synthetic 70s library music, with maybe a soupcon of drum 'n' bass/jungle and ambient techno) and meld and mold them into a distinctive, intoxicating whole. If MHTRTC isn't an absolute all-time classic in my book, it's because the music suffers a titch from paradoxically being too self-similar and too inconsistent, and being released in the decade of the necessity of filling CDs (both of which negatives are increased tenfold on Geogaddi, along with their extramusical esoteric preoccupations, aka getting sucked up their own asses, though I do like the "Kids Say the Darnedest Things About God!" closer, which is surprisingly wholesome given the rest of the album - Geogaddi is definitely less magical than its predecessor, even if it's more magickal. And IABPOITC pretty much is an all-time classic.)
So yeah, it's periodically ambient instro hip hop with library influence - if you think that that's the equivalent of taking a dump on a DJ Funk album in the name of colonialism, you're just as boring and weird as the chin-stroking IDM nerds we were all raised to fear becoming.
