Boards of Canada

The French electronic-music duo Air has garnered plenty of press for infusing chill-out music with psychedelic overtones, especially on the soundtrack to Sophia Coppola's film The Virgin Suicides. But when it comes to otherworldly sonic transport, Boards of Canada's second full-length, Geogaddi, trumps the Parisians' placid drift. Indeed, Geogaddi's oily whorl makes it one of the most psychotropic albums in recent memory. (Granted, fans of such narcotic music can have fuzzy memories, at best.)

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• Sofia Coppola
• The Beatles
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• Electronic Music

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From the cartoon fantasia of the Beatles' Yellow Submarine to the right-brained weirdness of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, psychedelia has often stressed the relationship between sound and color. Since its inception in 1996, Boards of Canada has favored warbly keyboard melodies that seem positively drenched in pigment. On the Scottish duo's debut album, Music Has the Right to Children, the word "orange" occasionally flits across the stereo spectrum, spoken in a monotone, while on Geogaddi the word "yellow" flares up in similar fashion, reinforcing the music's synesthetic edge.

Like just about everything the band has ever recorded, the selections on Geogaddi spread minor-key synth chords over fragmented hip hop beats, building and releasing tension in a long arc. But as the track titled "The Devil Is in the Details" suggests, it's the group's attention to nuance that lends each song a palpable aura. "Gyroscope" offers a frayed knot of drums, ready to unravel at any moment, while a child's voice ominously counts off numbers. "Julie and Candy" pairs distressed flutes with faraway playground buzz, and "1969" -- with its eerily electrified chorus of "1969 in the sunshine" hinting at half-remembered chemical reactions -- rubs together treble tones until their vibrations seem to generate light of their own.

For all of electronic music's ostensible futurism, Boards of Canada's take on the genre is profoundly nostalgic, shot through with half-heard children's voices, the synthetic flavors of early electronic soundtracks, and vintage public service announcements from the 1970s. That the two musicians live "in a beautiful place out in the country," as a 2000 EP suggested, also might have something to do with the sense of wide-eyed wonder in their recordings. Like the kaleidoscopic swirl of Geogaddi's cover art, the album envisions a postmodern idyll where technology lives happily alongside pastoral splendor.