Since its release on May 29, it has been impossible to listen to anything other than Inferno, the long-awaited latest album from Boards of Canada.
Like a number of people in my circle, I listen to Inferno, the new album from Boards of Canada, with obsessive devotion. Since it dropped on May 29, I launch it on my streaming platform and it loops all day. Sometimes I step away and the record keeps spinning. It continues its revolution. In the coffee machine, in meetings, over a drink with a pop star during an interview, I think of it. When I return to my desk and put my headphones back on, I wonder if the album will still be the same. It never is. Like all the Scottish duo’s records, Inferno is unstable. Ambivalent. To the point of doubting its very existence.
It is difficult to write about such a record without giving the impression of reading a philosophy lecture. Few articles do not cite the British philosopher Mark Fisher, who coined the concept of hauntology, “that kind of nostalgia for past futures, lost or unrealized, that continue to contaminate the present”, as Italian art historian Valentina Tanni summarizes. The very nature of Boards of Canada’s music, made of fragments of old radio recordings, soundtracks from institutional films, and familiar but memory-locatable melodic motifs, lends itself to this. After all, how to critique music that never seems to truly come into being, yet still comes to us? How to put words to a dream that persists and evaporates as soon as you think you are brushing its memory with the tips of your fingers?
Experience Under Influence
That the Sandison brothers had, in the mid-1990s, the intuition of a general exhaustion of the sources of wonder within the capitalist model, thereby prefiguring today’s nostalgic wave for a pre-internet era often fantasized, does not change a thing. What remains, nevertheless, is that once you move beyond the semi-conscious state into which this visionary music lulls you, there still exists its undeniable materiality.
Paradoxically, it is under narcotic influence – I mean morphine in a hospital setting – that I rediscovered this physical and visceral link, as if emancipated from any other form of abstract or theoretical drift, to see in this labyrinth of structures and sounds nothing but perfect beauty. It’s all about distance, perspective, and time in the end. I then recalled this line from American art critic Peter Schjeldahl: “If you have never felt that click that suddenly makes you see something through a frame, to grasp its fleeting, accidental beauty, then art will never provoke in you anything but rather soft reactions.” Boards of Canada’s music is also this frame, offering such fleeting opportunities. And Inferno has not finished turning.
Editor’s note originally published in the Music newsletter on June 5. To subscribe for free to the Inrocks newsletters, click here!
