We often think of time as a linear sequence of events. We experience it from point A to point B, following a straight, fixed line, each of our days building upon itself like a long run of dominoes. But time is abstract, as British theoretical physicist Julian Barbour argues in his seminal text The End of Time. He posits that we have “no evidence of the past other than our memory of it, and no evidence of the future other than our belief in it.” It echoes Kurt Vonnegut’s timeless 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five, in which all timelines—past, present, and future—occur simultaneously for the extraterrestrial Tralfamadorians, who think of death as an immaterial dot amid a vast, infinite dimension. Not to sound like a weed-dependent liberal arts freshman who just discovered metaphysics, but seeing something that was once standard and rigid as endlessly free-flowing can feel liberating, scary, and profound.
That may be how you feel as you finish listening to Inferno, the fifth Boards of Canada album, for the first time. At least that’s how I felt as the final moments of the gauzy closer “I Saw through Platonia” rang out in my headphones after my initial pass. Something like a heartbeat repeats in the background, and ambient synth pads rise and fall like stray objects in deep space. The titular “platonia” could refer to several things. There’s a genus of timber trees in South America. There’s an underground area that rests beneath the Altar of St. Sebastian in Vatican City. But in the context of Boards of Canada’s new record, Barbour’s theory of platonia, in which time is processed through a configuration space, seems to hold the most water.
This all sounds remarkably heady, and that’s because it kind of is. You could listen to Boards of Canada conjure rich electronic tapestries of analog synths, downtempo drums, and digitized vocal samples and appreciate these instrumental tracks for their compositional finesse, how Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin create a compelling soundtrack for the best sci-fi movie that doesn’t exist. But when you notice how they relate their music to loftier concepts such as time, religion, and the origins of the universe as we know it, Inferno connects on a much deeper level.
They lay that groundwork from its introductory, 35-second passage “Introit,” referring to a hymn typically performed at the beginning of the eucharist. Cascading synth arpeggios ensue, repeating a brief sequence atop a bed of static noise that soon subsides, paving a runway for the Disintegration guitars and Dummy drums that make up the bulk of “Prophecy at 1420 MHz,” a frequency commonly associated with the hydrogen line and a signal that an Ohio State astronomer used as purported (and perhaps debunked) evidence of extraterrestrial communication in 1977. Those religious and scientific allusions continue on “Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan.” The track’s nominal combination of a Biblical monster and the first three periodical elements created by the Big Bang feels apt, given how the music itself pulls from trip-hop, IDM, and even industrial to evoke new sonic realms for the duo.
Time and religion further intertwine in the five-minute epic “Naraka,” which refers to a temporary purgatory in religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. It’s stately and foreboding with its minor-key chimes and bells, and its back half sounds like a recitation of prayer until the divine respite assumes another form. The brothers bring back the instruments from the intro—thumping kick drums and shuffling auxiliary percussion—to accompany the vocal sample, ultimately summoning a different kind of reverie. The faint beeping sounds on “Memory Death” patter about the stereo field like an EKG machine, and choral synth pads soon enter the mix like voices from another world, at once calming and disorienting. Sandison and Eoin resuscitate those modulated guitars from earlier cuts for the mid-album highlight “Into the Magic Land,” now with tremolo-heavy synths and plinking xylophones, to deliver on its titular promise.
Synthetic sitars abound on “Blood in the Labyrinth,” a piece attuned to a desert voyage with starts and stops akin to rest breaks on a difficult trek. When the whole-tone synth chords enter with the drums and arpeggio runs on “Arena Americanada,” it sounds celestial, like stars blinking in the cosmos. Penultimate track “You Retreat in Time and Space” deploys washes of pads along with the solemn tenor of a church organ, playing into the record’s motifs of religious fervor. It’s suspended in that limbo until roughly the three-minute mark, where the melody coyly introduces itself, beckoning the drums to follow suit. The moment that those high-pass-filtered synths burble in the background, the result is something like Splatoon waiting room music, but make it ethereal.
Once we arrive at the album closer “I Saw through Platonia,” there’s a sense of finality lingering in the air. Like how Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool exuded an aura of closure, Inferno elicits similar emotions, especially when you remember that this is the fifth entry in a five-album deal Boards of Canada signed with Warp Records back in 1998, just ahead of their monumental debut, Music Has the Right to Children. But Barbour’s notion of platonia suggests that time is open-ended. Despite those looming feelings of closure, Inferno ends, paradoxically, on a note of beginning. Even if we are to accept that this could be Boards of Canada’s last album, the brothers have given us music with enough depth and detail to pore over for a lifetime. After the last few atmospheric synths fade into oblivion, all it takes to revive them is to hit the “play” button once again. The flickering notes of “Introit” transport us back, the worship service starts anew, and another cycle unfolds. [Warp]
Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist, and critic. His work has also appeared in Interview, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, NME, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City. You can follow him everywhere @grantsharpies.
