Music Has the Right to Children

Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin had been putting small records out for years before Warp and Skam released Music Has the Right to Children on 20 April 1998. Twoism came out in August 1995 on Music70, a private pressing. Hi Scores followed on Skam in 1996. The Aquarius EP, Skam KMAS001, came out on 5 January 1998 in a run of about 500 copies. The album, recorded at their Hexagon Sun studio in the Pentland Hills, is the one that left that circuit. It reached number 193 on the British albums chart. The BPI later certified it gold.

The pieces have the names of a private curriculum: Roygbiv, Aquarius, Telephasic Workshop, An Eagle in Your Mind, Sixtyten, Turquoise Hexagon Sun. The samples, widely discussed since, come from the texture of educational film and children’s television, cut until the nostalgia feels slightly wrong. That wrongness is the composition. A lot of “ambient” records of the period wanted a spa. This one wants a remembered classroom, with the numbers still on the board and the teacher out of the room. The beats are slow hip-hop as much as they are electronica, which is why DJs who did not play ambient still played Sixtyten.

Inferno, in 2026, was the first studio album they had released since Tomorrow’s Harvest in 2013, and the campaign around it treated the old records as a mythology. This is the mythology’s first public chapter on a large label: two brothers, a studio in the hills, a Skam 12-inch of 500 copies in January, a Warp album in April. Play Aquarius, then Roygbiv. The melodies are simple. The disturbance is that they are simple and still feel like evidence.

Sources

• Music Has the Right to Children: Warp and Skam, 20 April 1998, Hexagon Sun, the UK chart, and the later BPI gold certification.
• Aquarius EP: Skam KMAS001, 5 January 1998, a run of about 500 copies.