Glazed and diffused is pretty much how I felt when I first fell deep for, and deep into, Music Has the Right. The album had bypassed me initially: as a jungle fanatic, my metabolism was wired to the frantic futurism of breakbeat science. But something drew me back several months later—perhaps testimonials from others, or a gathering sense of its reputation. And that time around, Music Has the Right took over my life for a good while. The wistful ripples of milky synth in “Roygbiv” felt like a twinkle in time, a cinematic dissolve into my private past. Like fast-moving clouds casting shadows against a hillside, the melody-loop of “Rue the Whirl” shuddered with a sense of the sublime, the awful unknowable majesty of the world.

Like many others, I found that Music Has the Right had an extraordinary power to trigger memories. Partly this was a side effect of the wavering off-pitch synths, redolent of the music on TV programs from my ’70s childhood. But in a far more profound, fundamental, and deeply mysterious way, BoC seemed to be tapping into those deepest recesses of personal memory. Blending intimacy and otherness, the music put you back in touch with parts of yourself you’d lost. That was their gift to the listener.

Reaching for some kind of parallel or precursor, I could only think of David Byrne and Brian Eno’s 1981 album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, with its use of speech snippets as one-shot singularities (as opposed to the looped vocal samples that tend to figure in dance music and hip-hop). But where Bush of Ghosts, with its Arabic singers and Born Again preachers, worked through an exoticism of geography and cultural distance, Music Has the Right involved an exoticism of time. The memories it triggered for me were actually rather mundane: I pictured municipal spaces like parks and recreation grounds, classrooms and school science labs, back gardens or rainy afternoons indoors watching kids’ TV. They carried no particular emotional charge, but they were numinous with significance, akin to the way dream images can linger long into your waking hours, without ever revealing anything as legible as a meaning. Music Has the Right, in fact, was like a dream you could turn on at will.

As much as Boards of Canada harked back to Bush of Ghosts, they also harked forward to Ghost Box, the British label whose ectoplasmic sound and elegiac sensibility has come to define the 21st-century genre known as hauntology. Perhaps “memoradelia,” an alternate genre tag briefly floated by the critic Patrick McNally, is a better umbrella term for the audio traits and cultural preoccupations that BoC share with Ghost Box artists like the Focus Group and the Advisory Circle.

Among the many common concerns, a nostalgic fascination for television stands out as the major connection. During the ’70s especially, children’s TV programming in the UK featured a peculiar preponderance of ghost stories, tales of the uncanny, and apocalyptic scenarios (like “The Changes,” in which the populace rises up and destroys all technology). In between this creepy fare, young eyes were regularly assaulted by Public Information Films, a genre of short British programs made for TV broadcast and ostensibly designed to educate and advise, but which often seemed to be scripted and directed by child-hating sadists whose true goal was to increase nightmares and bed-wetting. Featuring the macabre voice-over tones of actor Donald Pleasence, “The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water,” for instance, warned of the dangers of ponds and lakes, while “Apaches” showed in grisly detail what might befall a bunch of kids messing about in a farmyard.

The unsettling content of all this vintage kids-oriented TV seeped into the brains of Sandison and Eoin at a vulnerable age. But what seems to have lingered even more insidiously in the memory of BoC, and the hauntologists that came after them, is the music. For many Brit kids, the sound effects and incidental motifs made for these programs by outfits like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop were their first exposure to abstract electronic sounds. Speaking in 1998, Sandison claimed that these theme tunes and soundtracks were “a stronger influence than modern music, or any other music that we listened to back then. Like it or not, they’re the tunes that keep going around in our heads.”

Another hauntology theme that Boards of Canada anticipated is the notion of the lost future. Again, this tends to be identified most with the ’70s and that decade’s queasy ambivalence about runaway technological change: On the one hand, there was still a lingering post-World War II optimism abroad, but it was increasingly contaminated with paranoid anxiety about ecological catastrophe and the rise of a surveillance state. “Looking back at TV and film from that decade, a lot of what you see was pretty dark,” says Sandison. By the early ’90s, when BoC were finding their identity, “all the sounds and pictures from back then seemed like a kind of partially-remembered nightmare. For us, it was a great source of inspiration. We couldn’t understand why it hadn’t occurred to anyone else to do it, it was a really obvious, natural thing to use.”

Another ’70s-in-vibe obsession of the brothers is what they call “strange sciences,” that zone where the boundary between reason and superstition gets muddy: bodies of renegade knowledge and “independent research” such as parapsychology, Erich Von Däniken’s best-selling books about “ancient astronauts,” New Age with its beliefs and techniques concerning healing vibrations and energy-flows, and many other forms of quasi-scientific magic and mysticism. “I do actually believe that there are powers in music that are almost supernatural,” Eoin once argued. “I think you actually manipulate people with music, and that is definitely what we are trying to do.”

Part of that manipulation of the listener goes beyond the sound itself and involves the framing of the music. BoC’s work is intricately brocaded with arcane references and encrypted allusions. They have cultivated cultishness. For a measure of their success, just check a BoC fan site, where you’ll find a feast of annotations and speculations: competing attempts to decode the meaning of titles, to locate the sources of samples, to decipher the half-buried fragments of speech.

“There is a story behind every title we use,” the brothers revealed in their first interview. It’s as if they were setting out the terms for future engagement with their work. Yet, as Sandison admitted in a later interview, most of those carefully placed meanings remained elusive and impenetrable. “If we were to explain all the tracks and their meanings... I think it would ruin them for a lot of people. It’s more like viewing something through the bottom of a murky glass, and that’s the beauty of it.”

For Boards of Canada, this deliberately hermetic aesthetic is designed to induct the listener into a deeper mode of engagement, and to conjure a sense that something more is going on than just sound for sound’s sake. “If it’s not about something, it feels unfinished,” Sandison says now. “Even as instrumental artists, you don’t have to neglect having a message or agenda just because of the absence of a vocalist. The kinds of bands we like have something going on that is way beyond just the music itself. I appreciate all that world-building, especially if the artist is doing something separate from the main flow.”

With Music Has the Right, BoC did build their own world, set apart from the wider currents of late-’90s electronica. After such an achievement, it would be unreasonable to expect the brothers to unfurl a wholly new sound and vision on each subsequent album. As their discography unfolded over the ensuing 20 years, Sandison and Eoin first intensified their approach with In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country and Geogaddi, then inflected it with the shoegaze-tinged The Campfire Headphase, and finally simply reiterated it with Tomorrow’s Harvest. But then the idea of Boards of Canada “progressing” or “evolving” goes against their very essence. Their intent with Music Has the Right to Children was to create a haunted haven outside the onward flow of Time. Why wouldn’t they want to live there forever?