Anna Minard claims to "know nothing about music." For this column, we force her to listen to random records by artists considered to be important by music nerds.

Music Has the Right to Children
(Warp/Matador)

Music Has the Right to Children opens up sounding like a massage room. There are ferns, dim lights, and lotion smells. A lot of people I talked to this week like Boards of Canada because there's almost no words, so it makes good background music for wordy things like writing and reading; I thought at first it would be too relaxing and end up being good background music for an accidental nap. (I tried to get someone to give me a back rub while listening to this by saying, "It's for work!" No one fell for it. Jerks.)

But starting very quickly, they mix it up a lot. It gets too strange for a reasonable masseuse. On "An Eagle in Your Mind," over the sound of a hospital breathing machine, an airplane flies faintly overhead. Then on "The Color of the Fire," a baby robot gurgles, "IIIII... loooove... yooouuuu." Halfway through, "Kaini Industries" is a keyboard on oboe setting, interrupted by a flute playing a typewriter. And the beats: "Sixtyten" has a beat that's low but bright enough to catch my attention. But the beat on "Roygbiv" makes my spine move without instruction. Y'know the difference?

If you look at the track listing, you can see that there are longer five- to six-minute songs interspersed with these minute-or-two interludes, e.g., that robo-baby. They're just handkerchiefs of sound waving as they pass you by. The longer tracks take time to develop, to build songs methodically yet organically, like sand castles, adding turrets here and moats there, and then erasing a whole wing to add a new dungeon or spire. Sometimes words exist in brief fragments: The track "Aquarius" is like a concentrated episode of Sesame Street, with some British guy repeatedly saying the word "orange," and a woman counting, and children laughing. But mostly if there are word sounds, they're chopped up and re-formed to be unintelligible—a roomful of conversation you can't quite catch, or a rambling sleeptalker. It sounds like words, but you can't unravel the meaning. The feelings here are nameless and mellow. On the album cover, nobody has any faces.

Once, a longer-than-usual pause between songs let a nearby construction site's noises come in my window. The shush-shush of something wet and the eeeeeeerrrrrrrr of a motor plus some unknown hum all sounded terribly organized and deliberate, just waiting for attention. I was sure you could layer a couple more sounds on top and call it a song. If you listened to BOC all the time, I imagine you'd suddenly be able to hear musical gifts all over the place in the world's noise, the way some people find snippets of poetry in spam e-mails and poorly written ad copy.

I give this a "now go find your own noise poems, weirdos" out of 10.