{"id":450787,"date":"2026-05-29T08:23:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T08:23:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/450787\/"},"modified":"2026-05-29T08:23:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T08:23:08","slug":"boards-of-canada-inferno","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/450787\/","title":{"rendered":"Boards of Canada \u2013 Inferno"},"content":{"rendered":"

Inferno by Boards of Canada<\/a><\/p>\n

The marriage of heaven and hell took place last weekend at Judson Memorial Church. The New York City landmark was one of seven venues worldwide to host the Inferno Sessions, the global playback events accompanying Boards of Canada\u2019s first album in thirteen years. Beneath the chancel\u2019s Byzantine-styled rose window burned the projection of an ominous cluster of fiery hexagons \u2013 a fitting introduction to Inferno. The album provides a map to the hope-inflected ordeal hell is undergoing on here earth. Only a few hundred devotees could sit for the reckoning, each of them primed by weeks of successive unveilings that heralded the return of the band. The release of Inferno unfolded through an ARG-style campaign featuring mysterious VHS mailouts, wheat-pasted album artwork appearing in cities worldwide, and the eventual emergence of lead tracks \u2018Introit\u2019 and \u2018Prophecy at 1420 MHz\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u2018Prophecy\u2019 breaks the seal of the record, a serpentine meditation coiling outward from Phrygian flutes and hazy guitars before hardening into clockwork grooves upscaled from BoC\u2019s earlier sound. The full breadth of the album\u2019s contours burst forth from the start. Then it speaks: a vocoded Vox Dei taking vengeance upon mankind\u2019s Promethean overreach, the \u201cfinal boss of the Boards of Canada universe\u201d as one YouTuber put it<\/a>, the stark emanation of an energy system that has long haunted BoC\u2019s discography. Obsessives quickly uncovered the source material and structural cipher embedded within the track: the vocoder\u2019s prophetic utterance, right down to the last tip of its delay trails, runs exactly 72 seconds \u2013 the same duration as the Wow! Signal recorded by the Big Ear telescope on 15 August 1977. That singular narrowband transmission at 1,420 MHz, known as \u2018the hydrogen line\u2019, has never repeated since.<\/p>\n

The void which followed \u2019Prophecy\u2019 and subsequent selections at the Inferno Sessions was suffused with a vigilant stillness, an almost sacred quietude held across the room between each track. What unspooled into the hush was equal parts divine and demonic. We guests were merely the silhouetted people to come as seen in Inferno\u2019s promo art, standing before the haloed edges of an apocalypse already arrived.<\/p>\n

Inferno reveals the wreckage of history as the last frontier of BoC\u2019s analogue aesthetic. Evolved from their early arcadian vibes and plaintive monosynth melodies, BoC confronts the fire of our times: modern civilization as failure, a post-psychedelic trip through the ruins, and The Great Conflagration now kindling in every corner of the Earth.<\/p>\n

Tracks shift between kick-driven syncopated grooves and immersive chemical vistas that make the record feel like hard overlanding on the desert flats en route to Gehenna. Shelter is offered incidentally: chanting communes, end-times enclaves, shambling skunk works of the world\u2019s last venture capitalists. The portents of Tomorrow\u2019s Harvest have passed \u2013 it\u2019s all hell from here out.<\/p>\n

Inferno arises as a theophany of competing revelations. \u2018Naraka\u2019 exemplifies the evolution of BoC\u2019s sound, integrating bone-needle percussion, sinuous synth lines, a sampled chorus of Hare Krishna adherents, and the relentless pull of a formless undertow beneath it all. \u2018Into the Magic Land\u2019 arrives as a voiceless Western ballad whose guitar chimes with a clean-tone solitude in a world given over to permanent detours. This is not the sun-baked sojourn of The Campfire Headphase; it\u2019s the arrival of the fourth horseman, steel-string in hand, trailing a sombre synth sequence that invokes the more contemplative corners of Philip Glass\u2019s Koyaanisqatsi score. Throughout the record, ambivalence abounds: crepuscular cadences and atmospheric shimmer cut Inferno\u2019s leaden dread, a rift from an ominous nowhere disturbs the saccharine somewhere heard in \u2018You Retreat In Time And Space\u2019. The end of the world will not extinguish our longings. Shards of heaven have lodged themselves within the hell we\u2019ve brought upon the land.<\/p>\n

\"YouTube<\/p>\n

Boards of Canada have returned to a semblance of the aesthetic they helped to invent. Today we drift in a cultural milieu where lo-fi music, analogue synthesizers and retro aesthetics alike have become thoroughly absorbed by the mainstream, to say nothing of latter-day cassette revivals, infinite instalments of Stranger Things, Instagram filters simulating super-8 decay, and a gyre of objects remade under the dying amber glow of the 70s and early 80s. Inferno, however, surpasses the simple ubiquity of nostalgia. The ever-increasing sonic fidelity of the BoC sound has proven contentious, but it is precisely Inferno\u2019s depth and hi-fi clarity that allows the album\u2019s gods their fullest refulgence. Despite its sharpened resolution, the record thrives through its distillation of vintage influences, indulging a hypnotic assemblage of haunted media in \u2018Tape 05\u2019. BoC\u2019s reclamation of their own hauntological sensibilities is more a testament to their archival acumen and control of the sonic palette than a remediation of nostalgic tropes.<\/p>\n

However, Inferno\u2019s ambitions exceed a mere recuperation of the band\u2019s retro-inflected origins. Boards of Canada enjoin us to abandon \u2018hauntology\u2019, that tattered lens through which retrospective impulses have been refocused into rescues of lost futures. For as much as the band have been cast as harbingers of the Ghost Box sound, the mile markers from \u2018Introit\u2019 to \u2018I Saw Through Platonia\u2019 move past late capitalist spectrality, instead confronting the cosmic and chthonic forces that precede human inscription. This album yearns to see through a world of ongoing ruination straight to the archaic substrate that lies beneath it.<\/p>\n

The final stretch of Inferno feels like a return to the cocoon, a desire for an incubation preceding selfhood, reconciling Music Has The Right To Children\u2019s \u201ccult of childhood<\/a>\u201d with the eschatological temper of BoC\u2019s later catalogue. During the concluding tracks at the New York gathering, the burning hexagon projection gave way to a montage of home movies featuring kids playing safely beneath the gaze of the family. Was this gesture an expression of longing for an oceanic escape? Or was it meant as a final glimpse at the Sandison boys as they bid us farewell?<\/p>\n

Perhaps Inferno\u2019s departing message is one of love, a theme easily overlooked in the brothers\u2019 work. From the iconic innocence of the \u201cI\u2026love\u2026you\u201d sample from Music Has The Right to the fractured agape stuttering throughout \u2018Father And Son\u2019 and the heartbeat that closes \u2018I Saw Through Platonia\u2019, locating the lost pulse of love is Inferno\u2019s most avowed and yet most subtle transmission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Inferno by Boards of Canada The marriage of heaven and hell took place last weekend at Judson Memorial…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":450788,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[156,157,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-450787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=450787"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450787\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/450788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=450787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=450787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=450787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}