Boards of Canada - Roygbiv

Excepting mediocre indie rock, electronic music of any form is oftentimes the most difficult musical genre to write about. This isn’t exactly a new point, but, usually lacking discernable instrumentation of vocals, the quality of writings on electronic music can be limited to the writer-at-hand’s imagination when describing the soundscapes coming out of the speakers. When I read a good review of an album like Autechre’s Tri Repetae that skillfully and clearly illustrates to the reader exactly what is happening from track to track I tip my hat.

In some ways Boards of Canada’s Music Has the Right to Children is easy to write about—it’s so obviously fantastic that the only struggle is finding a way to filter the words of praise. Then a song like “Roygbiv” comes along. How does one properly explain its excellence? Just as its majesty is fully revealed, it’s taken away. Given the song’s title, inevitable rainbow analogies are incredibly tempting.

“Roygbiv” was one of the first songs that demonstrated the possibilities of electronic music to me that wasn’t dance-oriented. As much as any other song from its genre that I can think of, “Roygbiv” unfolds its wrinkles so smoothly and so deftly that it comes across almost like a short story. Because of this “Roygbiv,” in only two-and-a-half minutes, captures what I consider to be the greatest attribute of all non-vocalized music, its capacity to excite the brain into painting pictures nearly as vivid as those created by the musicians themselves.

The narrative that constantly replays itself in my mind is the typical boy-leaving-girl-at-a-train-station scene, two lovers being callously torn apart by the harsh realities of the real world. This wouldn’t normally be a thrilling mental image at all were it not for the way “Roygbiv” slowly fades away over the song’s final thirty seconds, perfectly embodying a train disappearing into the distance. The fadeout appears so rapidly yet develops so slowly that the listener is always struck by an initial sense of disappointment, wondering what exactly happened to a song that promised to be so compelling. But that’s what makes me return to “Roygbiv” so frequently; if I listen to it again and again, I might actually find what I’ve been searching for, even though it was never there in the first place.

The last thirty seconds of “Roygbiv” may be a little frustrating, but in my eyes they are the song’s greatest attribute. By spreading the denouement out, it causes “Roygbiv” to seem all the more ephemeral, especially compared to the rest of Music’s songs, which usually check in at around five or six minutes. “Roygbiv” always ends too soon, dramatically heightening its status as a repeat button classic.

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