Boards Of Canada: Inferno
Twenty years following their first foray into live instrumentation on 2005’s ‘The Campfire Headphase’ (whose lead single, ‘Dayvan Cowboy’, is arguably a post-rock song), Scottish IDM innovators Boards Of Canada combine their signature hauntological, sample-heavy, woozy electroacoustic compositions with an updated production style that makes the duo sound like a fully-realized band on their fifth proper studio album, ‘Inferno’.
Appropriate to its title, ‘Inferno’ adopts the sinister and occult imagery that was present on their landmark 2002 album‘Geogaddi’and takes it even further into the darkness with chopped-up and heavily distorted vocal samples that sound genuinely demonic. The detuned and oscillating synths create a sense of existence outside the bounds of time and space, somewhere on the liminal edges of reality itself. The drums, when they are present, often sound like long-dead ghosts pounding on the walls of an asylum, or like a cultist ceremony in the woods that you were never meant to hear but can’t turn back from lest they be alerted to your presence.
The music of Boards Of Canada has always been rather slow and ethereal, but the songs on ‘Inferno’ take their sweet time to unfold, building tension and allowing the listener to establish their own presence within the music before revealing its true nature. For those of us fortunate enough to experience music synaesthetically, the scenes conjured by this record are neither polished nor traditionally beautiful; often, they are not even comfortable. They are ramshackle cabins, they are stone fences overgrown with moss, they are decaying remnants of a community that suddenly vanished under suspicious circumstances.
I am a huge fan of hyper-specific comparisons, so here’s one that will (probably) not make sense to anyone but me: after I watched the 2024 horror film ‘In A Violent Nature’, I had a very vivid and unsettling dream that expanded on the premise of that film; ‘Inferno’ would make a fitting soundtrack to that dream, particularly tracks like ‘Naraka’, ‘Into The Magic Land’, and the ominously-named ‘Blood In The Labyrinth’.
Though Boards Of Canada is no stranger to hiding Satanic, religious and mysterious imagery within their music, even down to their song titles and track lengths, that imagery is front and center here. Their previous efforts have felt as though such themes were being projected onto a screen and presented as a history lesson, but on ‘Inferno’, it feels like the band is orchestrating a ritual in real time and the listener is an unwitting participant in something they can’t fully comprehend. The music envelops and transports the listener, wrapping them in a weighty shroud of off-kilter nostalgia and anxious foreboding as they wander through the nightmarish world that Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin have expertly crafted across these 18 tracks. ‘Inferno’ is not a fun listen, nor even an easy one at times, but (and I absolutely do not say this lightly; I have a tattoo that references their debut album ‘Music Has The Right To Children’) it is their best work to date.