My Journey Through Inferno: A Reflection on Boards of Canada

Boards of Canada, the Scottish electronic and ambient powerhouse duo, have always been a mystifying presence in my life. I have no idea when I first discovered their strange, layered, and slightly haunting musical world - deeply unscientific searches through my Spotify account reveal that I first started really diving in at around the age of 18, in the midst of COVID lockdowns and all the uncertainty that time brought to us all. It makes sense - just as I was trying to get to grips with becoming a Fully Fledged Adult™, concurrently locked up at home whilst a massive existential threat battered everyone's outlook on their immediate future, I discovered a band whose music seems to encapsulate all of those feelings and more (all whilst soaked in 15 layers of vocoder samples).

It makes even more sense that, in yet another time where my life is in deep and unknowable flux, Boards of Canada drop their first new album in over 13 years with Inferno - an hour-long behemoth that has somewhat split the critics more than any other release throughout their career thus far. Pitchfork has lauded the album and called it "some of the most captivating music of their career", whereas The Guardian has branded it 2 stars and labelled BoC's "prodigal return as a big disappointment". But what do I think? Quite honestly, even as I put pen to paper 24 hours after listening to it for the first time, I'm still not sure. But I would like to reflect on the power of Boards of Canada's sonorous, unknowable world, and how pertinently it seems to have struck a chord with my own.

I listened to this album for the first time whilst driving to work at four in the morning, as the sun gently rose over the Sussex and Kent countryside and a light layer of fog languidly spread itself over the roads. From the very first couple of tracks, when the strange, fuzzy beginnings of Introit bled into the industrial, almost Nine Inch Nails-adjacent sound of Prophecy at 1420 MHz, I was deeply invested in the uncanny and slightly sinister world of this new release. BoC have always been described as having a slightly nostalgic quality to their music - the echos of synths and use of decades-old vocal samples, replete with the natural audio distortions of recordings of that age, lending itself very nicely to such a characterisation. However, Inferno combines this nostalgia with a sinister gaze into the unknown - and no track, in my humble opinion, does this better than Father and Son.

As an early appearance on the album's hour-long runtime, Father and Son has an important role in establishing the overall tone and imagery of the album; and it is also one of the most surreal pieces of music I have listened to in years. Framed around a dialogue between two voices - one young, one old - on the nature of god and the divine, all whilst dunked headlong in inquisitive snares and strange vocal distortions throughout, you can't help but be slightly perturbed by its strange, somewhat haunting sound.

Fans of BoC quickly ascertained that the vocal sample comes from a 1971 episode of Man Alive, a BBC docuseries covering "all aspects of society in the UK and abroad". The languid American drawl of the younger of the two voices on Father and Son gives away that this particular episode focuses on the latter half of that synopsis - specifically, a religious sect named "Teens for Christ"/"The Children of God". These are likely the same "Children of God" that now operate under the moniker of "The Family International", and were infamously one of the most abusive and mysterious religious cults of the late 20th century. Knowing this context gives the dialogue between the eponymous Father and Son of the track a further chilling layer of context - the former is pleading with the latter to “bring that same feeling”, that of cultish religious dedication, “home”, whilst the son simply returns that "a man's foes will be those of his own household".

We have no idea what became of either of the pair - and this unknowability, combined with the dark and sinister instrumentals of the track itself (the context of which is only knowable you take a deep-dive into the BoC sample database) creates a song that perfectly fits into the industrial, strange and existentially-paranoid world of the band's discography. As many note, BoC are very interested in the world of cults and the total dedication of your life to something both knowable and unknowable - the most famous example being their 2000 EP In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country, which centres around the Branch Davidian religious sect and their involvement in the infamous Waco siege of 1993. The title of the album (as well as its third track) come from Amo Bishop Roden, the follower of a separate Davidian sect, and her description of leaving your home and life behind to live in rural Texas in dedication to the lord - aka, The Beautiful Place Out In The Country.

I have no more eloquent way of putting this - I go absolutely nuts for this kind of thing. Sinister, cultish religiosity explored in ambient electronica that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up? Yes please. Shooting you back to the passenger seat of my car yesterday, as I drove to work in the early hours of the morning, and as the dawn gently rose outside, I didn't know about the album's sampling of cult imagery, or the wider world of sinister religiosity that the album explored - I went into my listening experience totally blind. And what I experienced was a strange, uncanny reflection on the existential paranoia that is our individual roles in both the past and the future. How does our lived experience affect what is to come for us further down the line? Is there something else out there for us to worship and dedicate our lives to? Or, as the vast, largely-empty synths of the final track, I Saw Through Platonia, as well as its final and juddering end, implies, are we simply left with the vast, perpetual unknowability of the random and incoherent universe?

My first Boards of Canada listening experience occurred when I was becoming an adult, and was completely clueless as to what I wanted to do with my life. Now, as a 23-year-old, semi-freshly-graduated but still-deeply-clueless adult, this new BoC release has come at just the right time. Compared to 5 years ago, I know what I want to do with my life, in the broadest of terms - I've been lucky enough to get an entry-level job in the industry I want to spend the rest of my life working in, and am lucky to have a stable enough homelife to live with my parents whilst trying to more firmly cement my starting steps on the career ladder. But we live in undeniably turbulent times - the rise of AI as a faceless monolithic force threatens everyone my age with redundancy before the age of 30; world politics, let alone those in the UK, are more fractured than ever; and none of us really know exactly what lies ahead for all of humanity in the next 5 years.

Inferno encapsulates all of this and more. The early nostalgic, more industrial sounds of the album lead you to believe you're in safe territory - for example, my own early yet tentative steps in my post-university career - but the echoing synths, eerie references to cults and religiosity, as well as the sinister distortions throughout the album's hour-long runtime constantly remind you that not everything is as it seems. Just as the unknowable and uncanny quality of the album's overall sound implies, I have no idea what the future holds for all of us - but hopefully it at least contains one more BoC release before they hang up the synthesisers once and for all.

Suffice it to say, I really liked it. Go and lie down in a dark room and give it a listen.