More and more artists came out with urbane variations of downtempo, making music that was built to be stylishly ignored: Kruder & Dorfmeister, Lemon Jelly, Zero 7, Thievery Corporation, Groove Armada, Cinematic Orchestra.

The man licensed every track from 1999’s Play to advertisers, and he pushed the album to double-platinum sales in the process.

In the early ’00s, that newness was gone, and atmospheric downtempo electronic music had become, in some ways, the sound of commerce. The people who made that music during that era weren’t inventing a new form, but the idea of what they were doing - throwing away old pop-song ideas, conjuring feeling with hazy computer-constructed bleep-thumps - was charged with newness. ‘Geogaddi’ continues to be an alluring piece of the Boards of the Canada puzzle, which cemented their already unique sound even as it undermined its optimism.In the late ’90s, the very idea of atmospheric downtempo electronic music felt new and exciting. ‘Music is Math’ remains a highlight of the Boards canon in its perfectly rendered woozy synths, and nagging BBC vocal sample, with percussion that could encourage a dancefloor whilst subtly troubling it, and ‘the Devil is in the Details’ hinted at the deeply layered satanic codes which many committed fans were convinced they had unearthed. The vocoded refrain of ‘1969 in the sunshine’ on ‘1969’ framed a sense of wide-eyed optimism within a subtly ominous landscape of nauseous synths and hazy hip-hop percussion, while tracks like ‘Energy Warning’ and ‘Beware the Friendly Stranger’ provided moments of severe, troubling forecast which were situated as much within contemporary fears as the Cold War subject matter from which the album took its cue.

Embedded in the motifs of the album’s 23 tracks seemed a foreboding sense of coming apocalypse which drew strongly from the electronic dystopia of Kraftwerk’s ‘Radioactivity’. If 1998’s ‘Music Had The Right The Children’ beguiled in its naivety, with voices of playing children ringing from some half-remembered time, ‘Geogaddi’, released four years later, unearthed a more sinister dread from the palette which had made Boards of Canada’s first album such vital listening.

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