Inferno

The joys of hauntology aren’t what they were when Boards of Canada released Tomorrow’s Harvest back in 2013, much less what they were during their initial emergence some three decades ago. It’s become weaponized, a half-remembered dream manipulated to resemble a legitimate past that was cruelly snatched away from us and replaced by a howling void of a future. When people who believe this is the true existential crisis of their lives need somewhere to turn to figure it all out, they often wind up falling into a space where they’re susceptible to cultish separatism and apocalyptic ideation — and it’s this space where Inferno casts its brain-itching spell, an alpha-and-omega state of time-looping death and rebirth. The plunderphonic subject matter and source material has never felt more directly confrontational of this doomed RETVRN impulse — samples of Christian cult-driven familial estrangement (“Father and Son”), tragic angel dust testimonials (“Blood in the Labyrinth”), and readings of Aleister Crowley’s philosophies (“All Reason Departs”) speak of a perspective where all change and renewal is channeled through a drive for new life that necessitates a cleansing end of the old one. Their music has undergone a similar death-and-rebirth impulse, if subtler; BoC now treat their beat-driven ambient sound and recursively built another level of hypnagogic memory death and rebirth into being. The aesthetic that struck so many nerves with Music Has the Right to Children and Geogaddi has been treated with the same sense of hallucinogenic saudade that they used on the vintage VHS and filmstrip atmospherics that originally sustained them, a next-gen acknowledgement of the idea that the ‘70s analog synths and breakbeats that were dusted off to sound ready for the Y2K cusp are now refracted through an additional layer of nostalgic yearning. And with that yearning comes an unresolved tension that roils through distortions of the once-recognizable: the hovering, smeared guitar chords of “Prophecy at 1420 MHz” disintegrating Cure-esque post-punk into John Carpenter minimalism, the staccato-yet-stately “Arena Americanada” displacing synthwave’s prosperity-glowing pastel neons into rusting, recession-era earth tones, “Naraka” rendering club music’s early 21st Century fascination with South Asian rhythms into a simultaneously sorrowful and renewal-seeking Hare Krishna chant. If all we have left to look forward to is the past, Inferno points to the shock of what happens when we try to build the future out of it — a familiar beauty that can’t help but feel like a brush with oblivion.