Inferno

The long awaited new Boards Of Canada album- Inferno- came out a month ago. I've been meaning to write about it ever since. Sometimes in the ever increasing velocity of the modern world there is a temptation or urge to comment immediately, the post a review or hot take RIGHT NOW! and I think I've been trying to fight that with Inferno, subliminally maybe, and give it time to soak in and see what I make of it not on the day of release but a month later. It's very much an album that is designed as an album, with a theme running through it, to be taken in one sitting. 

There's been a thirteen year gap between Inferno and its predecessor, 2013's Tomorrow's Harvest. In that time the BoC duo have had a lot of time on their hands to work out their next step. That thirteen year gap has coincided with a lot of things happening on the geopolitical scale and while Boards Of Canada may not be overtly political they have absolutely made music that reflects the modern age. An audio mirror, transmitting the unease and disquiet of the 21st century and steeped in hauntology, voices from the 1970s and 80s repurposed. Public information films. Waco and David Koresh. Ecological disaster. Promised but undelivered futures. False memories. Childhood. Our culture's fixation with both nostalgia and modernity. 

Inferno is all of this and more, the soundtrack to societal collapse. There are muffled, hip hop drums, woozy synths and sounds that could be My Bloody Valentine's guitars taped and sampled from a transistor radio. Backwards sounds and static. Music for the half world between dreaming and being wake, the feeling that you've dozed off with the late night 24 hour news playing. Organised religion is on their minds too. 

In Age Of Capricorn a voice from American TV reads out nonsense as a synth pattern wobbles away. Another voice comes in, 'I see you!' it says, 'Come into my heart, save me!'. On Naraka the synths and chords are urgent, the title music to a dramatic current affairs news programme announcing the apocalypse, modular synth notes blurred with South Asian singing and a low growl. Chords that nod to late 90s/ early 2000s Warp. The BoC pair have pulled Naraka out of the fire, a track to stand alongside their best. Naraka is Sanskrit for Hell. 

Inferno is four sides of vinyl, seventy minutes and eighteen tracks long. It's a whole piece not a collection of tracks. You could argue it's a bit too long but it's an investment- you have to see it through and although there may be a couple of missteps, it's rewarding and illuminating. It's not cheery- the track titles alone give you an idea of what to expect (Memory Death, Blood In The Labyrinth, All Reason Departs, The Process). Nothing quite does what you expect it to- they are masters at jarring sounds, melodies suddenly leaping out of the blue, repeating for a few seconds and then vanishing, drum tracks that are slightly off or that hang around for an irregular numbers of bars. Wrongfooting the listener is all part of the experience. 

Dark, gloomy, intense, the sound of a world burning- Inferno is all of these things but at the end there is some light with the two minutes and thirty nine seconds of I Saw Through Platonia, a calming, ambient haze, gently shifting synth sounds and a faint pulsebeat, the sound of human life continuing. It may not be saying 'don't worry, everything's gonna be alright' but it does offer some relief, a counterpoint to the malaise and just maybe the promise of better days (or at the least the soundtrack to drift off to as the ship goes down).

 

Monday's Long Song

Love Cry is nine minutes and fourteen seconds long and not a single second of it is wasted or superfluous. The long drone intro, interrupted eventually by some off kilter computer sounds flitting in and the thrum of bass, set up the remaining eight minutes. The drums kick in after a minute, rattling and urgent, there are synth squiggles and a three note refrain and after four minutes a vocal, a female voice fed through some kind of FX, intoning 'love cry'. The voice and synths get more and more mangled, the drums and patterns looped and repeated, the musical equivalent of a Möbius loop. Kieran breaks the whole thing apart eventually, the loops collapsing into each other and then a gentle ending, the calm after the storm. I have many favourite Four Tet tracks and Love Cry is absolutely one of them. 

Love Cry

An Hour Of Balearic Beats

Today's Sunday mix comes courtesy of Leo Mas, a veteran of Ibiza in the 80s, a DJ at Amnesia from 1985 onward and one of the pioneers of what became known as the Balearic Beat. Leo has done a 1987 mix, an hour long set split into two halves and out digitally and on cassette (for the genuine 1987 experience). 

It covers all the ground you'd hope it would, the anything goes, freewheeling spirit that he and Alfredo and others found in Ibiza and played in their sets- the ten minute sampler at Bandcamp bounces out of the speakers with The Woodentops and Why Why Why and from there heads into anything and everything Leo fancied playing that had a beat- EBM (Front 242's Join In The Chant), proto- house and techno, Belgian New Beat, goth synth pop and electro and more. 

You can get The Dark Side (Irriverent Mix) at Bandcamp. There are two ten minute previews. The whole hour long mix can be found if you click buy. 

Oblique Saturdays

A series for Saturdays in 2026 inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's set of cards, Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas). Eno and Schmidt created them to be used to unblock creative impasses and approach problems from unexpected angles. Each week I'll turn over an Oblique Strategy card and post a song or songs inspired by the suggestion. 

Last week's Oblique Strategy suggestion was Revaluation (A Warm Feeling)

My responses was Saint Etienne's revaluation of late 90s/ early 00s pop into their 2021 album I've Been Trying To Tell You (with Jane Weaver on board on remix duties) and Taking Heads way back in 1978 with New Feeling. 

The Bagging Area community came up with these: Walter with The Beastie Boys and Paul's Boutique; Ernie with Van Morrison's Warm Feeling; Rol and The Smith's Paint A Vulgar Picture; Al G and The Avalanches; Chris with Killing Joke; and Ardliz with a twenty minute Julian Cope extravaganza, Planetary Sit In, that you should know if you don't already...

This weeks' card says this- Make a blank valuable by putting it in an exquisite frame

This is the first time I've turned an Oblique Strategy card over and felt that maybe Mr Eno and Herr Schmidt are taking the piss a little. 

Maybe it's time for this...

Eno Collaboration (Remix)

Half Man Half Biscuit back in 1997 on their voyage to the bottom of their road.

'Brian's not at home, he's at the North Pole but if you'd like to leave a weird noise'

Going back to the card and the suggestion that I make a blank valuable by putting it in an exquisite frame made me think about sleeves and artwork, pop music presented as high art- the Pet Shop Boys have been doing that since the mid- 80s but I wouldn't call their music blank, defitnely not the imperial phase they went through from '87 to '92. 

Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat...

Left To My Own Devices 

I wondered about bad music in good sleeves and, I suppose, the idea that Eno and Schmidt are hinting at; re- framing nothingness as a masterpiece. 

Talking Heads (them again) final album Naked came in a sleeve that played with this idea, a painting of a chimpanzee holding a flower with a heavy gilt frame around it, as if taken off the wall of a gallery. I don't think making Naked was a particularly happy experience for the band, they all knew they were splitting up. Guest stars abound- Mory Kante, Wally Badarou, Kirsty McColl and Johnny Marr among a cast of dozens. On (Nothing But) Flowers Marr plays genuinely brilliant, inventive African hi- life guitar, freed from straitjacket of The Smiths to do whatever he wanted. Meanwhile David Byrne sings about nature reclaiming the cities, a Pizza Hut all covered in daisies...

(Nothing But) Flowers

In 1971 Bob Dylan presented his masterpiece, a song that first appeared on an album by The Band, Cahoots, and then on the second volume of his Greatest Hits (a very odd selection of songs sequenced strangely too in a will this do? sleeve). 

When I Paint My Masterpiece

It's a typically laid back early 70s Dylan song, something quite ordinary in a way- ordinary for him I mean, it's not what I'd describe as blank but equally it's not the match of the songs from his 1964- 1966 purple patch and it's not a Blood On The Tracks song either. Having said that it's vivid and fully realised and streets ahead of some of the stuff he put out on Self Portrait. 

It was a song that Dylan discarded and then went back to, reappearing in his Never Ending tour setlists. When asked about it in an interview in 2020 Dylan said this-

'It's grown on me... I think this song has something to do with the classical world, something that's out of reach. Someplace you'd like to be beyond your experience. Something that is so supreme and first-rate that you could never come back down from the mountain. That you've achieved the unthinkable. That's what the song tries to say, and you'd have to put it in that context. In saying that, though, even if you do paint your masterpiece, what will you do then? Well, obviously you have to paint another masterpiece'. 

Feel free to put your own responses to Make a blank valuable by putting it in an exquisite frame in the comment box. 

White Gardenias In Your Eyes

I've been enjoying Thurston Moore's 2020 album By The Fire recently, a double vinyl nine track record. Four of the tracks are really long- Breath is over ten minutes, Siren over twelve, Venus thirteen and Locomotives over sixteen. Around these lengthy guitar and electronics with voice songs are some shorter ones. Deb Googe plays bass ad ex- Sonic youth drummer Steve Shelley appears on Breath. Side One has two superb songs- the second is Cantaloupe, a heavy guitar tune with sludgy riffs and psychedelic fireworks, Thurston singing like it's late 1969, coming back to the refrain, 'white gardenias in your eyessssss'. Thurston's guitar solo is totally Hendixian. 

Before that is By The Fire's opening song Hashish- a slow burning introduction to the sound of the album, Television guitars and Black Sabbath riffing, more than a dash of Thurston's ex- band Sonic Youth and nicely ragged, drawled vocals.  

Hashish

Hashish is partly inspired by Arthur Rimbaud's 'derangement of the senses' and partly by Thurston's desire to present love as a narcotic state of being. 'Smoke it and see', he advises. 

Three years before By The Fire Thurston released Rock n Roll Consciousness which was led by the song Smoke Of Dreams. 

Smoke Of Dreams

Two guitars, one spindly and Sonic Youth- esque, the other a Neil Young style topline. Steve Shelley is there on drums again and Thurston sings softly. It's got a studio jam looseness, sounds live and like it was done in one take, Thurston drifting back through four decades of music making, sifting through the embers. 

Andrew Weatherall died in February 2020. Not long after a series of YouTube playlists came to light, Andrew's late night song selections, known as The Black Notebooks. There's a comprehensive post about them at Ban Ban Ton Ton. One of the songs in one of Andrew's black notebooks included was Smoke Of Dreams. 

The Mountain

Gorillaz released their ninth album back in February, a fifteen song set called The Mountain. It's a concept album, like all Gorillaz albums are, but this one's about death and grief and the question of what happens next. The two human mainstays of Gorillaz, Jamie Hewlett and Damon Albarn, lost their dads within a week of each other while they were in India working on the album. Damon wanted to include Indian singers and musicians- Asha Bhosle (who has since died) appears along with Asha Puthli and Anoushka Shankar. Some of the album was recorded in Mumbai, Rishikesh and Jaipur and the Indian strings and classical instruments are all over the album and very affecting. 

The album was also recorded in London and Florida and there's a slew of guests with Johnny Marr playing on several songs and Idles and Sparks turning up. Once Damon started writing the album it struck him that if the songs were about death and loss, then some of the vocals should be provided by previous Gorillaz guests who had since died. He went back to the tapes and found vocals that hadn't been used on earlier songs, vocals by Mark E. Smith, Dennis Hopper, Trugoy The Dove and Bobby Womack. (Damon didn't get all the deceased contributions he wanted- Lou Reed's estate denied permission, Lou's dying wish was that there be no posthumous releases, Terry Hall's vocals had been wiped and MF Doom's had already been used elsewhere by Danger Mouse). Tony Allen appears as does rapper Proof. All these dead guests found their way into new songs, the voices reincarnated into new songs. 

It's supposed to be heard as a single album, a full piece rather than cut up into digestible chunks to backdrop perpetual doom scrolling. Like all Gorillaz albums, some of it hits and some doesn't. At times Damon's electro- pop smothers the Indian instruments and there's a lot of stuff going on- as ever in Gorillaz world there's a lot of content. But there are several songs that are very good and rather affecting. The opener, The Mountain, is based on an Indian folk song Albarn heard at Rajasthan and reworked with the Hindu Jea Band Jaipur in Jaipur. It's a lovely song, the Indian melodies and instruments doing their thing with Dennis Hopper's voice in there too. This eight minute cartoon segues The Mountain with The Moon Cave (with Bobby Womack and De La Soul's Trugoy) and album closer The Sad God and is a good snapshot of the album. The animation is a joy too, Murdoc, Noodles, 2D and Russel in Disney Jungle Book style.

Last weekend Gorillaz played some stadium gigs in London. This photo turned up on Johnny Marr's social media him and Paul Simonon on stage together, side by side on guitar and bass. A dream guitar- bass combo. 

Johnny and Paul appear on one song on the album together too, Casablanca. It doesn't sound much like either man's former bands, with little trace of either The Smiths or The Clash in it. Johnny's way with a chord sequence is right there though among Damon's electro-pop and enervated vocal, the drum machine pushing away and a choir of voices ascending. Along with a few of the other songs on The Mountain, there's something about it that I find quite moving. 

Casablanca

City Red Hot

Even typing is hot work at the moment. I'm not one to moan about hot weather, we get precious little of it in the north of England and once a year go abroad seeking it, but it does make doing everyday things difficult. As Lee Scratch Perry noted in 1977, city too hot.  

City Too Hot

Lee's solution was to go 'go cool out/ upon the hill top' which makes perfect sense especially when chanted over the top of one of those spacious, otherworldly rhythms he conjured up in the Black Ark in the 1970s. Eight sweltering minutes of dubbed out rhapsody. 

In 1990 Mark E. Smith set his sights on British people in hot weather. We're not really prepared for it are we? One hint of sunshine and there are men walking round with their shirts off, moorland fires started by people with disposable barbecues and an array of milk bottle legs and hastily dug out shorts. 

British People In Hot Weather

The song turned up on the B-side of Telephone Thing. Mark clearly found it all too much. 

'British people in hot weather/ Fill green envelopes and send them to you/ On train ride remarks tracks/ Play Walkmans loud behind you/ Demonstrate on Oxford Street/ About what the hell they couldn't tell you.... 

...people in shorts drunk before you/ Beach wailing Wapping/ His armpit hairs are sprouting/ Designer tramp goes grrrrr/ Looking jolly from Stoke as he walks through/ And makes up titles like this to order/ They're well off their trolley/ Smoking like a chimney/ The spectacles stared out/ British people in hot weather'.

In 1993 The Fall and Lee Scratch Perry came together with The Fall's Why Are People Grudgeful?, a splicing together of two Jamaican singles, Lee's 1968 single People Funny Boy and Joe Gibbs' answer record People Grudgeful. Mark took lyrics from both and combined them as the then current version of The Fall cooked up a post- punk/ alt indie skank.

Why Are People Grudgeful?