Boards Of Canada :: Inferno
Photo Courtesy: Warp Records
It’s been over a decade, thirteen years to be exact, since the sibling-led Scotland-based electronic duo Boards of Canada recorded their last studio album, “Tomorrow’s Harvest,” back in 2013. It seems like a lifetime ago, but in essence, things have advanced; it's escalated into a science fiction hellscape where data is sold for pennies, nickels, and dimes. Led by Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin, the project has been active since 1986, releasing several atmospherically compiled cassettes and acclaimed albums, including their latest effort, “Inferno,” over the past four decades. The group returns after a hiatus, while remaining productive outside of releasing full-length records throughout the 2010s. Boards of Canada have become creative cult legends in the sophisticated soundscapes of Scotland and beyond, with their brand of cinematic charisma and cosmic curiosity about the occult, and their radical reach into the deranged depths of the human psyche. The duo has blessed the liberating line and electrifying ecosystem of electronic music for decades, and “Inferno” is simply a textbook triumph in the group’s weird world of technically transcendent tones and prolific peaks into the greater parts of the mind.
Recorded at the duo’s Hexagon Sun Studio in the Pentland Hills of Scotland, a radical range of harrowing hills southwest of Edinburgh, with the all-too-familiar echoes spiraling from their early works like 2002’s “Geogaddi,” nearly half of the album is instrumental, with strong guitar leads blazing through the night like a train barely staying on its tracks, while drums and spiritual synths rip through the atmosphere’s alchemy, establishing a captivating climate of living, breathing sound. Throughout the album’s alchemical atmosphere, universal undertones of religion, the occult, and several other spiritual systems enrich the entries and exits of the songs like a never-ending broadcast somewhere high in the frozen mountains of Nepal. Featuring sophisticated signals and sonic shards of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, an Islamic scholar, Osama bin Laden, a Christian televangelist, sermons, Aleister Crowley, and the cultural chanting of the Hare Krishna, “Inferno” is as ceremonial as it is creative, and quite possibly one of the group’s greatest artistic achievements.
