Scottish Albums of the Decade #5: Boards of Canada - Geogaddi

If 1998's Music has the Right to Children was the record that opened up modern electronic music to whole new vistas of possibility – both in terms of its staggering emotional charge and its radically holistic approach to instrumentation and melody – then 2002's Geogaddi is the album that found Boards of Canada attempting to deploy their own aesthetic innovations from new and disorienting perspectives.

Geogaddi is a strikingly Borgesian work; a fractal entity wherein rhythm and melody enter into a strange and heady symbiosis. The catalyst in this case is to be found in the layers of looped, overlapping drones that surpass anything from Music has the Right in terms of sheer psychedelic invention. From the kaleidoscopic artwork to the intensive use of reversed audio artifacts, hidden messages and submerged melodies, Geogaddi provides the listener with a labyrinthine framework in which each individual can employ their own creativity and emotional intelligence to direct and effect their own experience of the music.

BoC's always-mentioned engagement with childhood is again in full effect on Geogaddi (damaged and distorted children's voices, educational film soundtracks and half-heard snatches of nursery rhymes are marshalled expertly – just one element of their sound that their legions of imitators can never seem to get right) but this is far more than mere motif. Yes, this music does allow us to see the world with a child's sense of wonder, awe and trepidation – but from that vantage point we then find ourselves within the proverbial Garden of Forking Paths. Is Geogaddi a meditation on lost innocence? An attempt to induce mass psychosis? Or is it a vehicle to bridge the distance between God, science and nature? We will find new questions each time we listen.