Boards Of Canada – Inferno
★★★★
WARP
The tapes started arriving on April 7, VHS cassettes stickered with the Boards of Canada hexagon sun logo, sent from Warp Records to the homes of various people who’d previously purchased something from their Bleep.com retail site. The purposefully degraded footage contained therein featured various mysterious images including a Greek Christogram and a distorted image of US TV evangelists Jim & Tammy Faye Bakker, while the audio featured a reversed snippet of The Elegants’ 1958 doo-wop single Little Star (taken from 2019 Boards Of Canada mixtape, Societas x) plus audio from an advert for the Moody Bible Institute’s long-defunct monthly magazine (“all for only $2.95!”) And the promise of a “free hexagonal flexi-disc…six voices and music to guide your path,” Understandably, speculation and theories ran wild, as was intended.
Since the arrival of their debut LP, Music Has the Right To Children, in April of 1998, Scottish brothers Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin have harnessed the nostalgic power of old media, using vintage equipment and degraded samples to craft a bittersweet electronic sound that blends nagging, washed-out melodies with fragmented beats. Conjuring up imagined memories from a faded analogue childhood: a wistful municipal futurism, half-remembered in the dystopian digital present.
In fact, the potency of this identity, whether filtered through the playground pastoralism of MHTRTC or the saturated unease of 2002’s Geogaddi has arguably sustained the group’s mythos even when their music proved less than beguiling. If the wavering folk textures of 2005’s The Campfire Headphase, or the moody cinematic dronescapes of 2013’s Tomorrow’s Harvest, suggested somehow lesser albums, their creative emptiness still felt artistically correct; something to do with the decaying of memory and identity, and how time eats away at important details.
With Inferno, however, a definite sense of engagement has reappeared. Speaking in 2005, Marcus Eoin said of BoC, “We hold fairly radical views about environmental and political issues. We just avoid being public about it… I have to choose to either make music or become an activist.” And while Inferno is not the music of activism, it certainly sounds like a record recorded in response to current environmental and political issues.
As with all previous BoC LPs, Inferno starts with a naggingly familiar ident loop that suggests a retrieved memory of Schools TV. However, with track two, Prophecy At 1420 MHz, the mood immediately turns dark, a foreboding muezzin wail ushering in slow, gassed beats and spiked shoegaze guitar chimes, over which a distorted male voice intones: “I am God, the ultimate spirit.” With track three, Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan, the mood is eerie, claustrophobic; the bright spaces that could once be found in BoC’s sound now become narrow and sinister. On Age Of Capricorn, a computerised American voice spells out “U-S-A-M-A-M-A-A-U-S-U-R-M-U-S” and then tells us “You are marvellous” as indistinct voices appear to sing a religious chant of positivity, and another male voice asks for someone (who may or may not be God) to come into their heart. The sense is of something undefined being invoked.
The use of sampled speeches from various religious sources also calls to mind David Byrne and Brian Eno’s landmark 1981 LP, My Life In The Bush of Ghosts, but whereas that LP often felt like a satire of religious faith, Inferno, with its focus on American voices and the chasm between what’s said and what’s meant, suggests something far more urgent and critical.
Somewhere Right Now In The Future returns to the familiar BoC sound of a corporate jingle left to warp in the sun, but beyond that, Inferno invokes its more sinister purpose. Within the brief uncertainty of the ominously titled Acts Of Magic can be heard the sounds of buzzing flies, indistinct gabble and oxidised rhythms. Amidst the slow skittering beat-creep of The Word Becomes Flesh, a female voice narrates the development of an embryo in a context that, again, suggests something unwelcome “developing into a mature organism”.
Occasionally, this tense, uneasy mood is abandoned for the kind of zoned-out summer drift that BoC do some well, but the unease of arcane whisperings returns in the album’s final third, on tracks like Arena Americanada, which suggests a nocturnal journey through the backstreets of an abandoned urban utopia, and The Process, the soundtrack to a distant riot in that self-same city. Inferno ends with an elegiac piece of soothing melancholy (You Retreat In Time And Space) and the hazy autumnal decay of I Saw Through Platonia, where the only rhythm is a steady, soothing heartbeat that, inevitably, stops. Quite where that leaves us is up for debate, but if this is the last broadcast from BoC it is one that finally feels fully attuned to the queasy nightmare of the present as opposed to the cloudland of the past.
Inferno is out May 29 on Warp.
ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade | HMV
Tracklisting:
Introit
Prophecy At 1420 MHz
Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan
Age Of Capricorn
Father And Son
Somewhere Right Now In The Future
Naraka
Acts Of Magic
Memory Death
The Word Becomes Flesh
Into The Magic Land
Blood In The Labyrinth
Deep Time
All Reason Departs
Arena Americanada
The Process
You Retreat In Time And Space
I Saw Through Platonia
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‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.mojo4music.com ’
