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).
