Boards of Canada
Inferno
WARP
What worse way to have your first fresh music in over a decade hyped than having our current permission-bedamning White House administration glue its usual brand of pig-nationalist imagery over your new spooky song via social media? Boards of Canada aren’t even from the US or our neighbors to the north, but rather Scotland. “Warp Records and Boards of Canada do not condone the unauthorized use of their music for political messaging,” went the immediate reaction from label and artist yesterday, and amen to that.
Yet if you were looking for vicious, deeply meaningful music for a sound bed that would hum below images of flags and fortifications, you could do worse than glom onto Boards of Canada’s most evocative-ever album—a series of searing, down-tuned tones and dark chordal scores rippling with cryptic hot-headed speech samples and seemingly authoritarian robo-voice blips from a mean-spirited beyond. Though its Munch-like sonic scream is ultimately and dizzyingly ambiguous—and in no way and am I saying this to implicate anyone—it’s as if Boards’ brothers Marcus Eoin and Michael Sandison fashioned their newest complicated soundscapes for Inferno around such warring imagery and battleground fugue states.
Thinking back to how early Boards albums like Music Has the Right to Children influenced the vaguely holy death-trip electronic jazz of Bowie’s elegiac Blackstar, there’s a funereal funk—literally and figuratively—to Inferno tracks “Prophecy at 1420 MHz” and “All Reason Departs” with their swirling musicality and voiced religious overtones. While such faith is tested during the flecked lava flow of “Father and Son,” there are broader topics scaled to human size on songs such as “Arena Americanada” and the chant-heavy “Blood in the Labyrinth,” both of which act as the sound of horror that Curry Barker must use for his next obsession. Surely Boards of Canada will never fully explain what Inferno means or was meant for. We’re better for it, I think.
