Boards of Canada's 'Inferno' is a mesmerizing journey through the realms of hope and despair, a testament to the band's enduring influence and their ability to capture the essence of our times. This album, a global playback event, took place in seven venues worldwide, including the Judson Memorial Church in New York City, where the marriage of heaven and hell was projected onto the Byzantine-styled rose window. The album itself is a map to the hope-inflected ordeal of hell on Earth, a reflection of our modern civilization's failures and the impending Great Conflagration. The release unfolded through an ARG-style campaign, featuring mysterious VHS mailouts, wheat-pasted album artwork, and the emergence of lead tracks 'Introit' and 'Prophecy at 1420 MHz'.
'Prophecy' is a serpentine meditation, a vocoded Vox Dei taking vengeance upon mankind's Promethean overreach. It is the 'final boss of the Boards of Canada universe', a stark emanation of an energy system that has long haunted their discography. The track's source material and structural cipher, including the vocoder's prophetic utterance and its delay trails, are a fascinating study in symbolism. The duration of the track, 72 seconds, is a nod to the Wow! Signal, a narrowband transmission at 1,420 MHz, known as 'the hydrogen line', which has never repeated since.
The album's atmosphere is one of vigilant stillness, a sacred quietude that unspools into divine and demonic forces. The tracks shift between kick-driven syncopated grooves and immersive chemical vistas, creating a sense of hard overlanding on the desert flats en route to Gehenna. The album offers shelter in the form of chanting communes, end-times enclaves, and the shambling skunk works of the world's last venture capitalists. The portents of Tomorrow's Harvest have passed, and it's all hell from here out.
'Naraka' exemplifies the evolution of BoC's sound, integrating bone-needle percussion, sinuous synth lines, and a sampled chorus of Hare Krishna adherents. 'Into the Magic Land' is a voiceless Western ballad, a clean-tone solitude in a world given over to permanent detours. The album is a testament to the band's archival acumen and control of the sonic palette, a reclamation of their own hauntological sensibilities.
However, 'Inferno' also challenges the concept of hauntology, a tattered lens through which retrospective impulses have been refocused into rescues of lost futures. The album yearns to see through a world of ongoing ruination straight to the archaic substrate that lies beneath it. The final stretch of the album feels like a return to the cocoon, a desire for an incubation preceding selfhood, reconciling the 'cult of childhood' with the eschatological temper of BoC's later catalogue.
The album's departing message is one of love, a theme easily overlooked in the band's work. From the iconic innocence of the 'I...love...you' sample to the fractured agape stuttering throughout 'Father And Son' and the heartbeat that closes 'I Saw Through Platonia', locating the lost pulse of love is Inferno's most avowed and subtle transmission. The album is a testament to the band's ability to capture the essence of our times, a journey through the realms of hope and despair, and a celebration of their enduring influence.
