Retrotalk: "There Is No Sound of the 2020s" versus "The Future Is Not Lost" versus "21st Century as Cultural Void?"

A flurry of recent debate on the topic of cultural stagnation versus "the future is alive and well actually!"

Here's an interesting article by Gabriel Szatan at Resident Advisor from a few weeks ago

It starts with a electronic dance festival experience that feels blocked and static:

But by some deadening alchemy, the sets smushed into a homogenous paste, largely indistinguishable in tempo and tone. 

From this, Szatan extrapolates to a general pervasive feeling of being stuck on a 7 out of 10 plateau, anxiously wondering when the distinctive and defining sound of the 2020s will surface: 

No matter the soundtrack, the feeling echoed: this is good, not great. The lightning-in-a-bottle effect that animates club culture seems to be in hibernation and it's not just hampering nights out, either. As of late, electronic releases seem to exist on this same endless plateau. We have more music to enjoy than ever, but what's increasingly nagging at me is that this overfamiliarity is actually the problem....

Electronic culture finds itself in a strange double condition: hyper-fragmented in theory, yet consensus-driven in practice. What used to feel like solid land has given way to an archipelago of disparate scenes with little awareness of their neighbours and, broadly, only slight modifications to preexisting sounds...

It's worth asking ourselves what exactly the 2020s will be remembered for musically. If we're invested in breaking new ground, time's running out to get that in motion. The alternative is circling a familiar neighbourhood over and over, repackaging iterations of the same sensation until the culture ages out....

The problem isn't that electronic music has stopped producing quality. It's an issue of quantity. There's more than the culture can reasonably metabolise, and, at a time when many pockets of the underground are still rummaging through the crates of the past, this bottlenecks the potential for new movements to cut through. Without anything to act as both a galvanising force and, occasionally, an antagonist to challenge, a lot of cultural motion effectively peters out.... 

Five of the revitalised sounds you're liable to hear back in the hands of DJs at, say, Houghton right now — tech house, dub techno, dubstep, minimal and prog - lack a clear aesthetic identity and, you could argue, lack risk too...

2026 lineups heaves with talent, yet the presence of artists who released their most crowd-animating work 20 or 25 years ago pops out more than usual...

In reality, it's little more than a revolving carousel heading nowhere fast with diminishing returns.

Szatan references "retromania" not as a book but as a genre, or an artistic mode cutting across genres:

The '90s has been well turned over by now, so what can we learn from the previous decade? At least three substantial, unique movements were generated in the 2010s: EDM, hyperpop and retromania, all large and notable enough that dozens of variants fold into, and spin off, from them.

The slipperiest of the three is retromania, less a hard sound than a change in mindset as nostalgia ran rampant, and expanded archives pulled whole histories of sound into circulation. In the 2010s, a flood of reissues met a desire to gain a multipolar understanding of music history.

... multiple scenes, including drum & bass, are threatened by "homage [as] the new product," per dBridge...

Then back to the main theme: 

the fracture of universal experience means we may never see a coherent sound of the decade again—in this or any decade. Without that, culture risks becoming even more aleatory than usual....

Essentially, as the world gets more expensive and progression stalls, we get sucked into cultural stagflation.

...it feels evident that electronic music's oversupply and option paralysis is causing damage.

We may have arrived at a point where knowledge and adherence to form leave people unable to conjure visions beyond the old frame.

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These are just snippets from a much larger, in-depth exploratory piece that is well worth your attention (as is the companion piece, its part 2, "No Music On A Dead Internet", which explores  archiving and the impacts of AI). 

(Some of Szatan's observations chime with my own recent Instagram-as-window onto dance culture thoughts)

I think this was a brave piece to write as the editor of a magazine that is right in the thick of the dance industry - a downer overview rather than rah-rah-rah boosterism.

The sensations Szatan describes from going to festivals or working through new releases... bustling activity and superabundance combined with a sense of blockage and redundancy.... the creeping feeling that nothing is quite new enough... these are familiar sensations to me, from starting to feel them with some acuteness in the late 2000s.  (I don't feel them so acutely these days, but that may only be because I'm not tracking the now and putatively "new" with anything like the same obsessive intensity)

Those back-in-the-day frustrating sensations are what caused me to come up with the term "hyperstasis".

At the time I wondered if hyperstasis was a superstructure to substructure equivalent to this economic malaise of the 1970s called "stagflation", a term Szatan drops in his piece. Stagflation is an economic paradox, what really shouldn't happen: the combination of low growth and inflation (usually inflation is a sign of economic growth - like the economy is running a fever).

But I don't think it is really a sound parallel. Hyperstasis is more to do with the horizons of what's musically thinkable, a feeling that no one can get to the next level of the 'game' but is just scurrying around on a plateau. That said, stagflation is such an evocatively gross word, it is tempting to deploy it in this context. .

Even one as semi-detached as myself can think of at least a few candidates for the New Defining Dance Sound of the 2020s. There's amapiano and bruxeria. The former is one where I do have that  "ooh, this is different, this is new" reaction. While also finding the initial excitement will fade a bit as the DJ mix chunters on - it starts to feel plateau-y (part of its innovation I suppose - the diffusion of climax). Still, the basic template-structure is a new way of organizing a groove. Then bruxeria - well, that has aspects that feel like irritation-as-aesthetic - the extreme sidechaining, the nagging GIF-like vocal loops - and seem explicitly designed to drive away the elder ear. This is one way that the New has announced itself - a harshness, a rhythmic disruption of groove, that you have to recalibrate your hearing for. 

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And so to the refutations, both of this specific Resident Advisor piece and the overall "cultural stagnation" perspective. 

We need not concern ourselves here with ripostes from the perpetually and chronically optimistic (don't they ever get exhausted with being themselves, these behold-the-plenty types? I find the sunny-side stance as unconvincing as folks who draw up lists of their 350 faves of any given year - c'mon, pull the other one, mate!).

Smacking a little of "behold the plenty" but more reasoned out, there was the Liam Inscoe-Jones book Songs in the Key of MP3 from a year or two ago. This was explicitly framed as a younger's riposte to elders like Mark Fisher and myself. Which is fine, although I wish the book had engaged with my thinking subsequent to the 2011 publication of Retromania, e.g. the Auto-Tune epic, or the whole book’s worth of counter-evidence marshalled in Futuromania - my own partial auto-refutation. (Still In A Dream also contains a chapter that dissents with Retromania, looking at how acute consciousness of history can be a basis for attempts to do new things - the chapter is titled "Revisionaries"). 

But that's fine, people selectively create a cruder, starker version of  their opponents (in this case, me) in order to have the arguments they want to have, the arguments they think they can win. I've done it many a time, with my own combatants!

And here comes another book, published last week in fact: The Future Is Not Lost, by Matt Bluemink.  This grew out of articles that similarly sparred with Mark Fisher's thinking, starting with the unfurling of the concept of "anti-hauntology" as an alleged genre represented above all by SOPHIE, along with Arca and Iglooghost.  

Here is Bluemink (what an amazing name - can it be real?) at his Blue Labyrinths blog describing the scope and themes of The Future Is Not Lost. 

"The book is a collection of my essays focused around the idea of the future as it relates to music, technology, architecture, and philosophy. The book itself is split into 3 chapters on a variety of interconnected themes:

1. Anti-Hauntology: The first section explores the idea of ‘futuristic music’, including artists like SOPHIE, Arca, and Iglooghost, and provides a critique of the nascent pessimism in the work of Mark Fisher through the philosophy of Bernard Sitegler.

2. Spatial Imaginaries: The second section uses the ethos of solarpunk to criticise the dystopian aesthetic of cyberpunk that has become actualised, not just in films, literature, and games, but in architecture and urban design. It also provides a reading of Peter Sloterdijk’s theory of foams, atmospheres, and desert islands to show how spatial philosophy can provide solutions to the climate crisis.

3. Individuation: The final section introduces the work of Gilbert Simondon and its influence on Bernard Stiegler and Gilles Deleuze. This section provides the theoretical underpinning of many of the previous chapters. It shows how individuation, conceived as an on ongoing metaphysical process, can lead to a fundamentally progressive form of understanding which allows for the creation of better futures.

And here's a bit on how hearing SOPHIE helped him formulate a counter-view to Mark's pessimism:

"From the very first moment I heard SOPHIE’s music I knew it was something different. It felt fresh. It felt new. Listening to Faceshopping was like being transported into an alternate reality that approached popular music from a radically novel perspective: a transgressive perspective. The old structures and forms were there, but shifted, changed, and morphed into something unrecognisable. Electronic music was finding a way forward, not only in some distant, abstract or academic sense, but in popular culture itself. Aspects of the experimental and avant-garde were being brought into popular consciousness in entirely new ways we couldn’t have expected. I had discovered the music of the future.”

Since Mark died a year before SOPHIE's "Faceshopping" came out, it's hard to know how he would have reacted to it. For what it's worth, I suspect that he would have been bowled over by it as a tour de force of sonics and conceptual provocation - as I was.  Especially as it is a song so bound up with his beloved glam - ideas of artifice, plasticity,  surface versus depth, theatricality etc. It is practically an audio-essay dramatizing the ideas of  Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life but updated for the age of the influencer. InstaGlam. 

Whether "Faceshopping" would have been enough to spark Mark to a rethink of his fundamental ideas about retro-paralysis, lost futures, hauntology... it's hard to say.

But I think "anti-hauntology" is an odd way to frame this music, since I rather doubt it was motivated by a desire to refute hauntology. I wouldn't be surprised if it emerged as an aesthetic in almost complete unawareness of  the hauntology discourse - it has far more to do with long-running aesthetics of camp and plasticity, drawing on precursors like electroclash,  Fischerspooner, drag and vogueing and ballroom, New Romanticism and the Blitz scene, avant-garde fashion, Warhol and the Theatre of the Ridiculous.... . As well as many mainstream manifestations, from Bowie to Madonna to Lady Gaga. In some ways SOPHIE is Gaga but with music that actually lives up to the rhetoric. 

Talking of rhetoric... I think it would have made more sense for Bluemink to come up with a genre term that expresses the positive and substantive properties of this new sound-and-vision, rather than define it reactively against something that may not have impinged on its creators' consciousness. The term "anti-hauntology" creates the impression that SOPHIE, Arca et al exist primarily to be recruited to Bluemink's attempt to refute K-punkian pessimism. But they might have their own reasons for doing what they do, completely unconnected from the debate about retro and lost futures.

(And if you'll forgive me tooting my own trumpet a bit...  the aesthetic of what Bluemink calls anti-hauntology is already strongly hinted at in my Digital Maximalism epic of December 2011 - using Rustie’s Glass Swords and various others I identify the hallmarks of a new sound - ultrabrite, shadowless, plasticized, denatured, 2D cartoony, “dry” i.e. reverb-less. I'm writing a couple of years before SOPHIE’s first releases and before PC Music get started. This emergent ultra-gloss maximalism is contrasted with the deep-and-dark minimalism dominant in 2000s dance, e.g. the dank and shadowy reverb-chambered sound of dubstep. I don't mention Burial but I could easily have done). 

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And then a few months back there was Audrey Wollen in The Yale Review asking "Is the Twenty-First Century a Creative Void?" and taking issue with Mark Fisher and myself again but mainly with W. David Marx's Blank Space, his history of the C21 so far.

Wollen notes a paradox about  Marx's book that I also noticed:

 "Blank Space offers 281 fast-paced, rollicking pages that provide an overview of an extraordinary number of cultural events—including the flourishing of reality television, Web 2.0 and social media, monumental social and political movements from Occupy Wall Street to MAGA—only to culminate with the bewildering conclusion that nothing artistically transformative has occurred."

But then that is hyperstasis, isn't it? A roil of activity, but nothing that really surges into the unknown. 

Wollen picks up on the kind of swampy metaphors that I and others use (in the intro to Retromania, I describe Time becoming like a sluggish river that meanders and forms oxbox lakes)

"If the second half of the twentieth century was a rushing river of culture, many feel that the present has become a brackish wetland, a marsh."

Then she tries to repositivize this trope in terms of moist fecundity:

"Maybe we are living in a marshland. Many creatures do.

Then there is the decelerationist argument, the zero growth / downshifting / permaculture polemic applied to culture itself as opposed to agriculture. 

"It does not surprise me that millennials and zoomers might be wary, unconsciously or otherwise, of contributing anything “new” to a stretch of history that has voraciously eaten newness only to cough up suffering. What about the past fifty, seventy-five, one hundred years makes barreling toward the future seem like a good idea? The Doomsday Clock reads eighty-five seconds to midnight, and for many across the globe a more local apocalypse has already arrived. Some of the archive fever of the past twenty-five years might be a form of emotional anti-accelerationism, a generation desperately trying to produce a wind drag on the forward velocity powered by the deathly machinery of the twentieth century. I can already feel the ground underneath my argument growing a bit soggy—I am, after all, a product of the cultural marshland of the 2000s. My perspective is history logged, mushy and inexact, my style is patchworked and gleaned, my analysis makes most sense mapped as doodled spirals. I find the declarative mode that is necessary for the construction of an avant-garde (or the loud lamenting of a lack thereof ) kind of cringe, to be honest, not because being born in the early 1990s made me allergic to earnestness, as is often presumed, but because of its absolutism, its unquestioned reverence for clarity and category"

And then a note of "OK boomer" condescension: 

I can empathize: it must have felt comforting to imagine there was a way to dress and a type of music to listen to and an art to make that situated oneself inside of history in a legible and linear way. But it was always an act of imagination (as evidenced by the various revolutions that once felt inevitable and around the corner, but never actually occurred), just as this whirlpool of stasis is a kind of imagining as well. The fact of the matter is that kitsch is now so overabundant that to not use or misuse it is to leave money on the table, so to speak — stacks of meaning-bucks, just sitting there. What’s difficult to accept, for those not from the marshes, is that subculture, and its glowing nimbus of futurity, has become a kitsch object as well. Not merely the specifics — the hedgehog prickles of a hairstyle, the fog of bass rolling in over a crowd—but the form itself.

The "kitsch" - meaning much the same as "cringe" - is a reference to Clement Greenberg's "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" essay of 1939, which paved the way for his championing of abstract art. In other words, exactly the kind of Movements that the likes of myself mourn, as we do Subcultures-as-Vanguards. These are now said to have become corny.  (An erudite letter writer to Melody Maker once accused me of becoming the Clement Greenberg of rock criticism, trapped in my own dogma - this at the height of my push for  the becoming-abstract of blissrock / shoegaze, Seefeel-as-Rothko). 

Finally the essay deploys an obscure musical reference, a Los Angeles band called Purity who specialize in cover versions of songs from subcultural sounds like hardcore punk and postpunk: 

"A cover of “Dance This Mess Around” is a repetition of a repetition, a warping of the warp, a slow decay of the slow decay. The listener descends into the mulchy bog, wet and thick. But this mire unexpectedly greens into acute feeling: somehow, Purity turns the lyric “I’m not no limburger” into one of the most wretched, mournful lines of any music I’ve ever heard."...

I have to salute how deftly Wollen sustains the marshland / mire / boggy ground tropes throughout the essay... 

She concedes that these strategies would not placate the declinists.

"[W. David] Marx would probably agree on a more Greenbergian line —yes, exactly, old cultural forms of radical possibility have been resurrected as half-hearted ghosts! Tragic! But what he misses, fundamentally, is the vice versa, the backward loop, that is also true: the kitsch object, the dancing shadow of a certain subgenre of rock and roll, is transformed through (re)restaging into a new, sprouting form of subculture, if that can be defined as what goes on underneath the opaque layer of mass commerce." 

An aside: Purity remind me slightly of another painfully knowing band, Bodega, who put out the (pretty funny title) album Our Brand Could Be Yr Life. 

^^^^^

It does amaze me sometimes that this debate is still going on - it will not go away. To use a Wollen-ism, we are bogged down in it.

I personally can't seem to get away from it - regularly receiving requests to talk on Retromania-ish topics. Often from newspaper journalists looking at specific revivals or retro fads. Sometimes PhD students or film makers. 

I do sometimes also wonder if, say, Mark or I had both been killed in freak accidents in 2005, ie. before the retro/hauntology discourse kicked off in earnest and well before either of us had written our book length disquisitions on the subject.. whether this debate would have emerged in quite as a pronounced way. 

But then I think, it obviously would have done. Partly because there were from the start other people making similar points - Momus, Adam Curtis - independently and in parallel with myself and Mark.  But mainly because... well, the objective conditions of the culture would provoke such a critique. It would be differently inflected - figures like Burial who are currently having PhD's centered around them might not have been so prominent in the debate. But the tropes that Wollen simultaneously mocks, parodies, and attempts to reverse and re-positive would have sprung up almost organically, like moss on peat.  

Boards of Canada - Inferno (a Hauntology Parish Newsletter Special Issue)

 I have been worried that the brothers’s new effort has not received the amount of attention it deserves. So to boost its profile a bit, here is a little something I prepared earlier (actually for their label, local indie imprint Warp Records). 

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We live in an age of over-exposure. Too many artists actively strip away their mystique, promoting a public persona first and the music a distant second. Going against the grain of our time, Boards of Canada remain an enigma. Rarely photographed, seldom interviewed, performing live just a handful of times over the last thirty years, Boards of Canada let the music speak for itself.

Where some of their peers in left-field electronica cultivate a quirkily charismatic public profile, Boards of Canada earned their cult love through the records alone – the beautiful, eerie music and the beautiful, eerie artwork wrapped around it. They don’t have an image, instead their sounds have an unique power to conjure images in your head. As developed on the landmark album Music Has The Right to Children (1998) - which was featured in Pitchfork magazine’s list of the greatest albums of the 1990s – Boards of Canada’s trademark style of detuned synths and blurry textures have the elegiac quality of faded family photographs, blotchy Super-8 films, worn-out tapes and beloved vinyl spun so often the playback is pocked with scratches and surface noise. It’s an aesthetic that’s been hugely influential, spawning numerous outright imitators, shaping an entire genre known as hauntology, and affecting mainstream artists as influential in their own right as Radiohead, whose Thom Yorke credits Boards of Canada as a major inspiration during their experimental Kid A / Amnesiac era.

The Boards of Canada sound palette has even crept into pop music, via widely used audio software like Reason and Logic, which contains kits that digitally simulate the analogue-sourced, wavering off-pitch sounds they pioneered, sometimes titling them after specific Boards of Canada tunes like “Roygbiv.” Their songs have also been directly sampled by cloud rap and trap artists such as $uicideboy$, Lil B, Travis Scott, Clams Casino, Yung Lean and Lil Peep, and by the ambient R&B singer Solange. Indirectly and directly, Boards of Canada have contributed to making the sound of chartpop and rap radio weirder and spookier.

But although Boards of Canada are innovators, their music never loses touch with the timeless qualities that make for lasting music: beauty and emotion. They are contemporary electronic music’s preeminent melodists. From “Roygbiv” through “1969” and “Oscar See Through Red Eye” to the new album’s “You Retreat In Time and Space”, their records overflow with gorgeous tunes – elongated melody lines that ripple across many bars (a rare thing in electronic music, which tends to work with vamps and riffs). The duo - Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin, brothers despite the different surnames – have spoken about how they are not primarily concerned with making dance music, but instead see rhythms as “just a vehicle for carrying strange and beautiful melodies. As far as we're concerned the important thing is that you can whistle our tunes”.

Although often positioned alongside Warp labelmates like Aphex Twin and Autechre as one of the three giants of electronica, the group have more in common with esoteric postpunk and industrial outfits like Devo, Coil, Nine Inch Nails, and Nurse With Wound, or with shoegaze pioneers like Cocteau Twins and My Bloody Valentine. Boards of Canada records are exercises in world-building: Sandison and Eoin are dreamscape gardeners who dissolve the boundary between musician and magician. The brothers have talked about their belief that music involves “powers… that are almost supernatural… You actually manipulate people with music, and that is definitely what we are trying to do.” Fans and critics alike testify to their music’s uncanny capacity for triggering buried memories. As unsettling as it is therapeutic, their music seems to reach back into your personal prehistory and part the mists of time.

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Parting those mists to trace back to the group’s own beginnings… we find ourselves in the early 1980s, when the brothers started experimenting with tape editing as children. “We used to chop up shortwave radio recordings on an ancient portable recorder, and make tunes out of them by punching-in and layering tracks in a crude way,” they told an early interviewer. By the end of the 1980s, they had evolved into something closer to a band, with a line-up that included guitar, bass, and live drums (as opposed to the programmed beats and looped breakbeats of their later work). There was even, occasionally, a sung vocal, rather than the artfully deployed samples and soundbites they would become famous for. Boards of Canada’s models then were “experimental atmospheric rock groups” like My Bloody Valentine and Cocteau Twins. Something of that dreampop vibe lingered on into their later famous work: a tonally warped blurriness, a misty-minded mood on the threshold between dreaming and wide-awake. “Like when you glaze over when you're listening to something, but you're still there at the same time."

Gradually Sandison and Eoin homed in on a distinctive set of sonic procedures that no one had yet thought to work with (although many would follow in their wake). They became fascinated with the fragility and fallibility of recording mediums, their specific rate of decay, and how this degradation of the material husk of memory added an extra layer of elegiac poignancy to the memories captured in a photograph or a cassette recording. So Boards of Canada started to apply “a process of corruption” to elements within their music, always preferring analogue effects to digital methods. They might run some parts of a track through a defective tape recorder. In one case, they took a whistle melody and “bounced it back and forward between the internal mics of two tape-decks until the sound started disappearing into hell. Like when you look at an image reflected within two mirrors forever, in the distance it gets darker and greener and murkier." By this point, Sandison and Eoin were working in their own studio as members of the Hexagon Sun artists collective, based in an area of rugged beauty to the south of Edinburgh called the Pentland Hills.

Apart from some early tapes heard only by friends and family, Boards of Canada’s public life as recording artists started in do-it-yourself / release-it-yourself fashion with the 1995 album Twoismissued via their own imprint Music70, and followed the next year by a very limited-edition cassette, Boc Maxima. That same year, 1996, they formed an alliance with Skam, a rising young electronic label based in Manchester, through which they put out the EP Hi Scores. Although Boards of Canadaslotted in comfortably alongside the Autechre-style crunchy beats and askew melodies of their label mates, you could already detect a unique sweet sorrowfulness to their tunes and tones.

Skam itself allied with the Sheffield electronic music bastion Warp Records to co-release Music Has the Right To Children, the group’s classic 1998 album. Limned with a set of intertwined obsessions expressed through the track titles and the samples used – leitmotifs such as the unspoiled beauty and timeless grandeur of Nature, the grounded yet spiritual folkways of Native American tribes, the innocence and the strangeness of childhood, psychedelic and paranormal states of consciousness – Music Has A Right announced a new and different direction for electronic music. Its smudgy textures and wavering off-pitch tones stood out against a late ‘90s backdrop of digitally crisp music full of fidgety beats and ultra-finessed production. Amid this wide-awake club of sterile sound and banging beats, Boards of Canada showed that music could still be the stuff of dreams.

Many of the sampled soundbites on Music Has A Right came from pre-teen voices captured from children’s television – kids giggling, sounding out phrases like “I love you” or chirping “yeah, that’s right!”. Others were calm and kind voices of authority, redolent of a doctor or a teacher, or suggestive of the voice-over on a nature documentary. The group’s name originally came from the educational programs, wildlife docs, and animations produced by Canada’s National Film Board, a culturally innovative institution whose work had a nostalgic allure for the brothers, who had lived in the state of Alberta for a few years when their father worked there.

This Arcadian imagery carried through to their next release, the 2000 EP In A Beautiful Place Out in the Country, albeit with a softly sinister undertone. On the title track, a vocoderized speaker invites the listener to “join a religious community and live in a beautiful place out in the country" – and it takes you a while to realize that this is an offer of membership in a cult sect. Geogaddi, the duo’s much anticipated 2002 full-length sequel to Music Has A Right To Children, pushed further into the foreboding with tracks like the ominously glowing “The Devil Is In the Details”. But there’s also something close to a Boards of Canada mission statement in “Music Is Math”, whose recurring soundbite about “the past inside the present” defines the group’s obsession with the threads of history woven into the fabric of now. At a time when most electronic music, from drum & bass to trance to minimal techno, was fixated on increasingly kitschy ideas of the Future, Boards of Canada were more in tune with the truths understood by poets and novelists: Proust and his obsession with “lost time”; Faulkner, who said “the past is never dead. It’s not even past”; and Nabokov, who dismissed science fiction with the comment “the present is only the top of the past and the future does not exist” while in his memoir Speak Memory salvaged as much of his own halcyon childhood as he could mentally retrieve.

The Campfire Headphase, released in 2005, harked back to a phase of the group’s own prehistory, with shoegazey electric guitars joining the customary arsenal of vintage analog synths and carefully corroded samples. Rippling with melody, tunes like “84 Pontiac Dream” and “Satellite Anthem Icarus” were classic iterations of the group’s established style, while “Dayvan Cowboy”, the second single off the album (as the lead tune of the six-track Trans Canada Highway EP), broke out for new terrain with stirring strings and an intricate battery of crashing cymbal rolls like drum sticks splashing into a pool of mercury.

After a long, fan-frustrating gap, Tomorrow’s Harvest arrived in 2013. From track titles like “Sick Times,” “Cold Earth”, and “Come To Dust through to the ambiguous album title Tomorrow’s Harvest itself, the record is shadowed with ecological unease and survivalist undercurrents. Sonically it is steeped in the influence of horror and science fiction film scores by composers like Fabio Frizzi and John Carpenter, and draws deliberately on the soundtrack vocabulary of the “video-nasty” era of 1980s straight-to-VHS exploitation movies. Tomorrow’s Harvest was the group’s first record to break into the UK Top 10 albums chart. Even more amazingly it cracked the Billboard pop chart too - peaking at #13 - a testament to how their fanbase has grown and expanded to new generations of listeners.

Now, after their longest hiatus ever – thirteen years of silence broken only by their celebrated NTS mix Societas X Tape, created for the 30th Anniversary of Warp Records in 2019 - Sandison and Eoin return with a startling new album. Inferno substantially reinvents their sound, drawing on some of the esoteric influences audible in Societas X Tape, while building on the darker atmospheres of Tomorrow’s Harvest.

Where once the beats rolled out calm and steady, inducing a head-nodding, heavy-lidded trance, there’s new rhythmic tension and density, a crisp intricacy of layered percussion and mid-toned bass as taut as an elastic band. Adding to Inferno’s atmosphere of unrest and disquiet is an expanded role for speech soundbites, which in some cases run continuously through an entire song, or are multiply meshed and overlaid to create a feeling of babble - like voices inside your head whispering sinister insinuations. Some of these vocals exude the blank-eyed sincerity of the cult believer; others resemble the kind of admonitory or soothing voices of authority piped out of the public address system in a dystopian movie like THX 1138. Nearly all American voices and often creepily processed, the speech elements woven through Inferno sometimes recall the sampled preachers and talk radio presenters on Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life In The Bush of Ghosts. At other points, the album feels like a soundtrack for an imaginary giallo, that Italian genre of psychological horror movie known for lurid, saturated colors, disorienting camera work, and tempestuously dramatic scores by composers like Fabio Frizzi and Goblin.

Inferno is a departure in other ways too: having hitherto largely avoided the topical and concentrated on conjuring up their own dreamworld alternative to reality, Inferno is unmistakably a record attuned to the dark forces and evil actors currently at work across the planet, a response to a world consumed by delusion, untruth, and digitally-updated forms of demonology. It’s probably as close to a political statement as these mystery men will ever approach.

For Boards of Canada have always avoided anything explicit or crystal clear; they traffic in the evocative and the elusive. Everything about their music – the artwork, the track titles, the vocal samples used – is pregnant with meaning. But unlike the blabbermouth self-curators of modern music, Sandison and Eoin prefer not to spell things out, for fear of breaking the spell. “If we were to explain all the tracks and their meanings... it would ruin them for a lot of people. It's more like viewing something through the bottom of a murky glass, and that's the beauty of it."

- Simon Reynolds

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