In Strict Tempo, vol. 112: You Retreat In Time and Space
Resident Advisor called it “dark and disquieting”, The Guardian have dubbed it a “big disappointment”, with dubious drum programming. The US Government have seen fit to use it to soundtrack a social media post about whatever war they’re fighting this week… but for me, it’s the album of the year.
It’s been thirteen years since Boards of Canada last released an album, and pretty much everything that’s getting thrown at Inferno was thrown at Tomorrow’s Harvest back in 2013. It was thrown at The Campfire Headphase eight years before that, and I’m sure some people found Geogaddi formulaic at the time of it’s release too. They were never going to rip the rulebook up with this album, and the highest praise I can give it is that it sounds exactly how you’d want a Boards of Canada album to sound. Some people might not think that’s enough, that the brothers should be pushing boundaries and re-inventing the wheel with each new release, especially after so long away, but that’s never been what they’ve been about.
Yes the album has moments of accessibility, but every LP before that has had those too, from Roygbiv to Reach for the Dead, Dayvan Cowboy to Music is Math. After listening to it on repeat for a week there’s still enough to challenge and surprise you with every new listen.
I’m not going to go track-by-track on it, part of the fun is discovering it for yourself and coming to your own conclusions. The standouts for me are definitely the more vocal tracks including Age of Capricorn, Father and Son and The Word Becomes Flesh, and you can spend hours on Reddit looking into the meanings and sources of all those samples if you want to really get down the rabbit hole. My favourite track on the album though? The penultimate track You Retreat in Time and Space. It’s like the whole album is leading up to this moment, lulling you into a sense of security before dropping this one track on you, hitting every emotion it was possible to feel all at once, utterly devastating, but euphoric all at the same time. I once read about a tribe somewhere that when punishing criminals would rest their head on a bent back tree before chopping it off, so the last thing they felt was ascending rapidly through the sky as the tree sprung back to it’s standing position - that’s probably exactly how this track feels.
Halfway through the year it’s not too bold a call to suggest this might be the album of the year, but I’d make a similar case for it even if it came out on January 1st. Slightly bolder, could this be in contention for album of the decade so far? It will certainly demand discussion, despite my obvious recency bias.
So yeah, I’m fanboying a little bit, but along with Aphex Twin and Squarepusher during that golden-era of Warp stuff in the mid/late 1990’s Boards of Canada were one of the first groups that made me understand that music could be weird and challenging and unsettling and incredible in all kinds of ways the teenage me couldn’t really understand. It was music that spoke it’s own language to me, and one that helped me find other people who spoke it too, and ultimately set me on the path to where I am now, 25+ years later. I’ll probably continue to fanboy over the album every time I speak to anyone in real life for the foreseeable future, so forgive me for that, and forgive me for not having listened to anything else this week either, so music reviews will be back next Friday.
You’ve probably pre-ordered it already, but you can get Inferno in all good record shops, and from Bandcamp.
A couple of other things to mention quickly this week, Manchester/Salford’s The White Hotel has announced its closure. I’ve never been (in fact my only visit to Manchester was an in-and-out trip to Old Trafford for Cambridge’s FA Cup game back in 2014) but the programming of the club often had me tempted for a return visit. I know the reverence it holds for Manc music heads is up there with how London folk felt about Corsica so it’s a real blow to lose a community focussed experimental space like TWH, even if it was the owners decision to close.
Also closing in the near future is the Nina Protocol site. Launched back in 2021 it aimed to be a more equitable DSP for selling music, giving artists a fairer share of any income. Initially it had a confusing blockchain/crypto element to it which I don’t think did it any favours, but eventually operated like a more regular download/streaming website. Some decent labels got behind it, including AD93, Hyperdub and Stroom, but ultimately when your business model is built around paying out more in royalties than your competitors it’s always going to be tough to be a profitable concern. I still think there’s space for a new DSP, probably one with a more curated roster of artists and labels, and Nina was probably a bit too early to survive. Like Bandcamp, the site also featured editorial features, and the founders are looking for a way to keep this side of things archived and visible.
That’s all for this week. Thanks as always for reading/subscribing/telling me I’m being way over the top about this album. Regular service will resume next Friday!