A classroom colour chart, left in the sun too long
The synth is warm the way old plastic is warm, slightly melted at the edge. Roygbiv does not develop. It arrives, bright, short, and already nostalgic for a lesson you may not have attended. A beat pats rather than kicks. A melody spells something you almost remember from a wall: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Marcus Eoin and Mike Sandison, the brothers who record as Boards of Canada, built their name on the documentaries of the National Film Board of Canada, the classroom films that hummed and degraded. This track is that hum compressed into a pop length, without a voice to tell you what the colours are for.
Music Has the Right to Children came out in 1998, on Skam and then Warp, made in their studio life in the Pentland Hills outside Edinburgh, the setup they have called Hexagon Sun. The brothers work slowly, with analogue boxes and a taste for tape that has already forgotten a little. Roygbiv is one of the record’s small doors, not a single in the campaign sense, a piece that DJs and late-night listeners lifted out because it felt finished in under two and a half minutes. The title is the mnemonic, nothing more mystical, and the mystique arrived because the duo so rarely explained themselves. When they did speak, in the scarce interviews around the album, the subject was memory, including false memory, the feeling of having seen a film that may only have been a feeling.
On a dancefloor the track is a palate cleanser, too brief to be an anthem, too melodically sure to be ambient furniture. People use it as a sunrise, which is fair and also slightly off. The colours in the title are a chart, not a sky. The emotion is the chart’s fading, the way educational media from the seventies now sounds like childhood even to people born after the reels were stored. Boards of Canada understood that lag and recorded inside it. Live appearances have been rare enough that the song’s life is almost entirely domestic: headphones, bedrooms, the repeat button. The hills outside Edinburgh do not appear in the music as landscape. They appear as the decision to stay away from the rooms where explanations are required.
The thing about the older films is that the quality of picture and soundtrack wasn’t perfect, it was grainy and wobbly. We used to record compositions on cheap tapes which gave a similar rough quality, and we’ve always returned to that sound because it feels personal and nostalgic.
(Boards of Canada, Forcefield, 1999)
What the sweetness conceals is the discipline. A short track by a duo this obsessed with texture is not a sketch they failed to lengthen. It is a length chosen so the colour chart does not become a lecture. Other pieces on the album wander for eight minutes and earn it. This one states the spectrum and leaves. The degradation, the wow, the slight wrongness of the tuning, does the talking a vocal would have pinned down. You are not told you are remembering. You are handed a sound that behaves like a memory, and the difference is the whole method.
What remains is the acronym, still cheerful, still a little eerie. Roygbiv has outlived the lesson plans it echoes. Children who never saw those films now know the word as a song, which is a strange completion of the brothers’ bet: that a degraded classroom could become a private weather, and that the weather would travel without them having to stand in front of it.
