It’s been 13 years since Boards of Canada’s last album. Can Inferno compete with the best of the brothers’ work? We were at the first listening event in Tokyo to find out.
Boards of Canada (BOC) emerged in the 1990s with a sound so utterly unique and captivating that it took decades for the rest of the planet to catch up. Their hauntological style of woozy synths, degraded samples and faded childhood memories has now become so common that you can hear it referenced even in TV show soundtracks.
But in 1998, when their debut album, Music Has the Right to Children, appeared on Warp, it was a revelation. Now, almost 30 years on, it is rightly regarded as an electronic music classic – as are most of their other albums, which continued to mine the same vein of gauzy nostalgia laid over crusty boom-bap beats.
It’s been 13 years since the last album, the relentlessly dystopian Tomorrow’s Harvest. This past April, strange video cassettes marked with the BOC brothers’ hexagon sun logo started appearing in fans’ mail boxes, followed by cryptic video clips on YouTube. This was all preamble to the announcement of the new album, Inferno, which will be released on May 29.
As part of the advance marketing campaign, a series of album premieres called Inferno Sessions is rolling out across the globe today, beginning at the Human Trust Cinema in Shibuya, Tokyo, and Attack was there.
How does this new work by Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin compare to classics like Music and 2001’s Geogaddi? I take my seat in the 200-seat theatre to find out.
[quote align=right text=”BOC emerged in the 1990s with a sound so utterly unique and captivating that it took decades for the rest of the planet to catch up”]
The lights go out, and it’s too dark to take notes. That’s OK because I wouldn’t be able to focus anyway, my eyes hypnotised by the slowly rotating hexagon sun projected onto the massive screen in front of me, its shapes flickering with slow-motion flames. This continues throughout the album’s 70-minute runtime, occasionally punctuated by confusing images of horror-movie candles and grainy 16mm home-movie footage.
The venue was a movie theatre in downtown Tokyo
So, the record. Inferno. The name is apt as it’s a very powerful album, probably BOC’s most upfront. The drums in particular are meaty and thumping, not something you’d expect from a band that started off sampling kids’ television programs. That playfulness of the early era is completely absent, replaced by disturbing and rambling speech about embryos and sacrifice and who knows what, the voices garbled and processed and layered on top of each other. It’s very cult, very occult, and you feel off kilter, like the drugs you took are hitting you harder than you expected, but you still have to hold it together while people in positions of authority explain important things to you.
Because of this, the disorientation, the anxiety-inducing background textures, and the heavy drums, Inferno comes across as BOC’s most contemporary album. This is no wispy nostalgic trip: this is you trying to hold it together while 21st-century reality melts around you. It’s a powerful experience, and probably their most confident statement – and that’s saying a lot for a band that arrived so fully formed. It sounds like BOC, and yet Inferno is also an evolution in their sound. The latter half of the record has more of what you expect from BOC, uplifting melodies and sweeping, cinematic synths, but even then, they’re augmented with acoustic sounds, real-world sounds, like piano, marimba and acoustic guitar. BOC exists in this world now. Or rather, we all exist in BOC’s world now. For better or for worse.
[quote align=right text=”It’s very cult, very occult, and you feel off kilter, like the drugs you took are hitting you harder than you expected”]
I can’t tell you the names of the songs, as there were no titles displayed on the movie screen, and we had to turn our phones off. Security was very strict. But I can tell you that Inferno is like other BOC albums in that there are slow songs that build in intensity, interludes, and a soaring, transcendent piece at the end. In that way, it will not disappoint. There are few hooks, however. Much of the album passes in a haze of drums, texture, and garbled speech. At some points, it almost feels like a trip-hop record, but if trip-hop had evolved out of early industrial groups like Throbbing Gristle and SPK. It’s menacing. It’s also at times overwhelming. Although maybe that’s just because I was sitting in the second row, in front of a theatre-grade sound system pounding at full volume.
When I told my mother that I was going to Tokyo to listen to an album and not a band play live, she said it sounded dystopian. Given that Boards of Canada doesn’t play live, and hasn’t since 2001, this is the closest that I can get to a BOC concert, and I’ll take it. But lack of live aside, even listening to a piece of music uninterruptedly, with no phone at hand to distract me, was wonderful. In fact, it was anti-dystopian. I could fully concentrate on the sounds, and the 70 minutes passed in what felt like 15.
This experience reminded me of how enriching it can be to listen to music as a primary activity. I used to spend hours every day doing nothing but listening to music. No TV, no distractions, just listening. And this event let me do that again. It may be dystopian that this is how we interact with music now, but the fact that album listening parties exist is a very good thing. I would love for this to become normalised and happen at movie theatres and other venues on the regular. Being given the opportunity to not have to engage with the anxiety feed for an hour was a real blessing. The fact that it also happened to be the new BOC album was the orange icing on the cake. Yeah, that’s right.
Find out more and pre-order on the BOC website.
Photos: Adam Douglas
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