Beyond the Inferno
The eschatology of Boards of Canada’s latest.
Enter through the detour. We start with a detour not just because — but also because — it’s the way anything honest starts nowadays. None of us thought, or wanted to think, that we would wind up here, facing this particular oblivion (some call it polycrisis). But we are, and unless we come honest by it, all efforts to escape will amount to little more than sticking our heads in the dirt.
Much of the engagement with Boards of Canada’s latest album has been just such a detour. For sure some of this has been down to the cryptic nature of Boards of Canada themselves and the Talmudic polysemy of their music. It’s no exception with their latest, Inferno. Even fervent fans have come to it through unexpected routes. Olivier Egli of Igloo Music opens their review of Inferno by confessing it started with a riff on the speculation that came in the lead-up to its release (the posters, the random VHS tapes). Sereptie of Acid Horizon and Lepht Hand practically conjured Inferno into being with his post on BoC and “corduroy psychedelia” (and his writing on Inferno itself has been equally excellent).
Ergo, there is clear value in the detour as a path of understanding, of coming to a subject from unexpected angles, of understanding the object’s residues scattered into odd places before you understand the object itself. Think, for example, of the Situationists’ concept of détournement (from the French détour, literally “rerouting”). When a soap advertisement is graffitied and painted over to state that capital leaves all of us unclean, it is not simply turning the spectacle of advertisement on its head, transforming it into its rational doppelganger. The détourned object engages unexpected reference points in the viewers’ perception, touching on hidden corners of their cognitive map. Its new logic proceeds from wholly different locations. Conventional meanings are collapsed, giving way to their strange and unexpected counterparts.
I had waffled on whether to write anything about Inferno. But the music of Marcus Eoin and Mike Sandison is so thick with meaning that there are perpetually new things to say. Though much of the aesthetic-social-philosophical analysis is worth pulling from (as I do here), there still seems to me a need to bring it back down to earth, to ask how it is that Inferno is such a resonant record, to make it all immanent.
These extended notes are not meant to substitute for any of the insightful analysis of Inferno, but to build on it. If the arrival of Inferno reasserts a breakdown in linear time – as was recently suggested on a recent Acid Horizon episode – then what moments in the now are given new direction? What does this particular integer of jeitztzeit look like?
Exterminism and survival. This is a drum I’ve been banging on for some time, and I will continue to do so. Mostly because it is the only framework – via EP Thompson, with help from Peter Frase and others – that seems to account for the nihilistic stupidities of the moment. Most contemporary attempts at understanding unfolding events fall into the rational or the personal. Neither explain to satisfaction.
When observers – liberal, centrist, and many leftists – argue that “none of this makes sense,” they in practice act as if capitalism were susceptible to appeals to sanity. What we learn from Thompson, however, is that acute and perpetual crisis, rooted in the inhuman contradictions of capitalism, create new horizons of possibility, shaped by the paradoxical advantage in being capable of world destruction. For Thompson, the momentums of Cold War imperialism had mutated into their own inexorable directions that propel the destructive choices made by key actors. Any action, wrote Thompson, “will follow the logic of advantage within the parameters of exterminism.”
Enter Trump, enter Milei, enter Miloni and their growing ilk. The incurious cruelty, the excitement for suffering in the other, indifference to the annihilation they invite, are the logic itself. As Frase writes, this is a framework adapted to an era of increasing climate disaster and pandemic. But, as John Carl Baker argued, the emergence of the Trumpian right and the fracturing of the unipolar, post-Soviet world order has reintroduced the spectre of nuclear armageddon.
It’s there that the echoes of history make themselves heard. Thompson was famously, heavily involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The CND didn’t campaign against just “the Bomb” per se, but the logic of terrible possibility that Thompson described, which had made world-ending technology real in the first place.
Western capitalism was full of cultural-propaganda artifacts designed to make the apocalypse seem survivable. The government of the United Kingdom produced pamphlets and animated instructional shorts called Protect and Survive, which had all the urgency of the placid inhabitants of an airplane safety manual as they calmly abandon a burning plane. Every segment ended with a circle enclosing the literal nuclear family in a safety that is ultimately an illusion.
Here’s the first point of reference for understanding Inferno. It is difficult to ignore an affinity between the family in the Protect and Survive logo and the family that accompanies much of the Inferno publicity (and indeed, family is a recurrent theme on the album, evident in tracks like “Father and Son”). Both are basic outlines, both stand in a hazy atmosphere of menace. But there are differences. For one, the Inferno family doesn’t have a circle of safety. They are also, looking closely at their silhouettes, lacking clothes. The Protect and Survive family pulls each other close. The Inferno family stands side-by-side, shoulder-to-shoulder. There are more of them, and the indicators of gender are somewhat more ambiguous.
Is this similarity intentional? It doesn’t really matter. Boards of Canada’s reappropriation of public broadcasting aesthetics – the sounds of 70s-era stereophonic workshops, technicolor gothic, tones and noises that you can see as much as you can hear the glowing color leaks, what Sereptie calls “the broader valorization of wonder, innocence, and affective reorientation promulgated through various American institutions during the post-Vietnam era” – has always consciously leaned into examination of abandoned future. This is the most pregnant valence of hauntology, and we are presented with one such “what if” here. If the members of the Protect and Survive family are safe in their illusion, the Inferno family faces the end with eyes wide open.
No track seems to more plainly embody the relationship to imminent apocalypse than “Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan.” Hydrogen, the infamous H-bomb, 100 to 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki, etched into the terror of countless schoolchildren. Helium, the element that can float us into the stratosphere (like the balloon embodying everything you do). Lithium, the numbing antipsychotic forced on so many to content them with an increasingly insane world. Leviathan, the gigantic beast seeking to swallow God’s creation whole.
And listening to this track – its arid, robotic beat, its whirring synths, its dark, creeping keys – it is easy to picture the family drifting through any number of ruined wastelands. The Cursed Earth of Judge Dredd. The irradiated outbacks of Richard Stanley’s Hardware. The forgotten outside of Logan’s Run. But it is also hinted at as a kind of refuge. For it bears mentioning that hydrogen, helium and lithium were also the first elements produced by the Big Bang; not just an end but a cataclysmic beginning. For every end always entails a beginning, a new conjuncture, a new range of possibilities opened up by what came before. What, then, is the new world on the other side of the Leviathan’s destruction? At around three minutes, we hear the faint sounds of a group chanting.
Apocalypse contains revelation. In fact, this is closer to the literal meaning of apocalypse. A revealing, an uncovering of different realities that may have always lived underneath one that is burning before our eyes. In the words of Evan Calder Williams, there is a “particular relation of ‘revelation’ and ‘end’ that makes apocalypse distinct from other modes of collapse, decay, and disaster. Apocalypse – specifically capitalist apocalypse – needs to be understood in distinction from crisis and catastrophe.” However, as Calder Williams elaborates, if we tend to think of this eschatological category in distinctly Christian terms – that of truths only seen by chosen eyes – the necessary apocalypse here is necessarily a one collectively experienced. The author continues:
[T]his doesn’t mean total destruction but rather a destruction of totalizing structures, of those universal notions that do not just describe “how things are” but serve to prescribe and insist that “this is how things must be.” What is revealed is what has been hidden in plain sight all along, previously only caught askance from the corner of our eye: the sudden exposure of what is present but not visible, because it did not accord with those real structuring forces of a totality.
This is the posture that Inferno strikes. Boards of Canada fans have tended to distinguish between the group’s brighter, more redemptive albums (Music Has the Right to Children, The Campfire Headphase) and those that tend toward the darker and more menacing (Geogaddi, Tomorrow’s Harvest). But while Geogaddi is frequently referred to as BoC’s “satanic album,” shaped by a mischievousness apropos to the post-Y2K moment, Inferno is better understood as “luciferian,” both more serious and leaning into its role of adversary. It is aware that an end of sorts is coming, but also that this makes it all the more necessary to counterpose the current reality with something ultimately utopian.
Most of the tracks on Inferno invite this kind of polysemic interpretation, beyond simple binaries of “good” and “bad,” mining the left-handed possibilities and scenarios that emerge when dualistic categories begin to break down. This is not to say that Inferno isn’t in some ways a very doomy album. It absolutely is. It is difficult to hear the computerized voice proclaiming itself “God, the ultimate resonance” in “Prophecy at 1420 MHz” and not hear the worst warnings of artificial intelligence coming true. Sereptie calls it “a vocoded Vox Dei taking vengeance upon mankind’s Promethean overreach,” and that about captures it.
Machinic voices are all over the music of Inferno. Often, they are only slightly less menacing than that on “Prophecy.” On “The Word Becomes Flesh,” they seem to comment on the recorded description of human reproduction. On “Blood In the Labyrinth,” raspy descriptions of drug-addled violence (sampled from a 1979 anti-PCP documentary) are ever so slightly modified to sound subtly metallic.
But the adversarialities set up by the rest of the tracks on Inferno aren’t so cut-and-dry as “human versus machine.” When we hear the Hare Krishna chanting (slightly electronically modified, though still recognizably human) in “Naraka” over a dense, whirling dervish beat, we aren’t hearing people worshiping the machine, still less in the ruins of a machine-ushered collapse. Rather, we hear a hybridity that seems to challenge us to… do what? Many things likely, but in the present, real-world moment, when AI is replacing not just human labor but reshaping and diminishing our collective cognition and belief in our ability to build a world, it’s difficult to imagine these chants as achieving something that machine cannot, but we also cannot in our current state.
Magic humans then? Magic plays a recurring role on Inferno: the rough bounce of “Into the Magic Land,” the pulsing tension of “Acts of Magic.” And it’s hard to think through the themes of this album without also recalling Arthur C. Clarke’s well-worn observation: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” So much of science fiction seems to interrogate the ramifications of this convergence for human subjectivity and human consciousness.
In Ghosts of My Life, Mark Fisher considers artists who – technologically or otherwise – sought to make their own voices something “other than human.” Japan’s David Sylvian, Tricky, Goldie’s Rufige Kru and others. To Fisher, these artists’ music “was about identification with the alien, where the alien stood in for the technologically new and cognitively strange – and ultimately for forms of social relations that were as yet only faintly imaginable.”
Directly following “Hydrogen Helium,” “Age of Capricorn” is probably the first track containing something like uplift, a catharsis after three songs in which the dread palpably builds. Prophetic and religious imagery play a role in the sampled voices: references to Nostradamus’ predictions of Satan’s return, televangelists reflecting on the violence of sin. But the gentle, soaring, almost symphonic instrumentations seem to signal a leaving behind of such crude, mundane attempts at understanding the sublime. It is the call-and-response choral vocals that seem to be more in tune with the song’s atmosphere, and each other.
Who are these simultaneous voices, reminiscent of the chanters of “Hydrogen Helium” and the Hare Krishnas of “Naraka,” and just as inhumanly human? In astrology, the “age of Capricorn” is the age after our own, the “age of Aquarius” made famous by the 5th Dimension and the 1967 musical Hair. If Aquarius (either already upon us or arriving soon according to different interpretations) is the astrological age of radical equality and human flourishing, the age of Capricorn (due to start roughly around the year 4000) is when humans achieve the evolution made possible by radical cooperation. Supposedly, humans in the age of Capricorn will be born clairvoyant, practically immortal, and in contact with other worlds.
It’s rather mind-bending stuff, and rather silly depending on who you talk to. The world crafted on Inferno, however, with its breakdown between science and religion, Lucifer and the Godhead, technology and humanity, ends and beginnings, makes this world of psychic, salvage communism seem imaginable, if not plausible. A kind of (post-)(anti-)humanist ontology in which old dualities have dissolved and allowed us to think of ourselves in relation to a cosmic arrangement we at present can barely grasp.
Chaos and poetry. Of course, inevitably, we must listen to and consider all of this not in the world of Inferno, but in our own. The wrinkle (which BoC seem highly aware of) is that even the faint possibility of this outlandish scenario becoming reality forces us to assess the contradictions of our own now.
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s short book Breathing: Chaos and Poetry was published in 2018. It argues (rightly) that the rise of the new far-right and the regimentation of life by the algorithm are dialectically intertwined. If anything, it is even more timely since the rise of AI. Berardi’s case lies heavily on the idea that human experience coded into ones and zeros, the attendant hemming in of critical thought, the growing indebtedness of daily life, the undead assertions that we can do no better, have thrown collective human experience literally off rhythm.
Referencing Felix Guattari’s notion of chaosmosis, Berardi sees the isolated, individualized, “post-neoliberal” subject as spasming, flailing, gasping for breath as the time of civilization is thrown into disarray. It is a concept not unlike Henri Lefebvre’s arrhythmia, the phenomenon by which cities under the squeeze of capitalism become literally sick, their steady thrum strained by the demands of an economic system always trying to go faster, always looking for a beat to skip.
The excess of poetry is where Berardi finds his remedy. To be clear, Berardi does not mean that we will be saved by literal written poetry. He uses poetry as a metaphor here. In his estimation, a push to embrace a more “poetic existence” can remetabolize and harmonize the inhuman chaos. “Only poetry will help us through the apocalypse that is already raging as an effect of decades of financial absolutism,” he writes. “Only poetry will soothe the suffering of the engineer’s mind and the poet’s mind, and will act to reverse the financial sphere’s grip upon language.”
It is not merely that utopia – a more graceful, harmonious existence – must be counterposed to the growing wreckage. In Berardi’s view, and the view of Inferno, utopia must use the wreckage, pushing through the detritus and reorganizing it along the way. Redeeming the disasters of history doesn’t just mean putting time on a different course. It requires opening up time itself.
“Deep Time” was the first full track released from Inferno. Boards of Canada dropped it into the world as a preview six weeks before the album’s release under the cryptic name “Tape 05.” In some philosophies, the human mind can’t fathom the eons upon eons that make up deep cosmic time. To grasp this is to go insane.
To Boards of Canada, though, knowledge of the abyss is ultimately a redemption, an existential balm, a final form of religious ecstacy and scientific discovery simultaneously. This is the mode that seems to characterize the back third of Inferno, from “Deep Time” on (though the menace of an overcalculated life does seem to stalk around the edges).
Jack Chuter, speaking on Acid Horizon, calls the ethereal, elegiac “You Retreat In Time and Space” a moment when BoC “blow open the walls of the present completely,” where the Sandison brothers are “floating above themselves,” hoping we see what they do.
The détourned potentials return here. We reimagine the world as it is now in more ludic, playful modes. “Arena Americanada” is practically a vaporwave track, but without so much of the smug irony that characterized the genre at its height. Errant radio waves long since freed from their destination waft through the air. Electronic rhythms bounce over abandoned military citadels and motorways. Even the title “Arena Americanada” reimagines the North American heart of an extinct empire as a playground.
Again, we are forced to consider this outcome layered on top of what we already know to be true. The final track on Inferno is called “I Saw Through Platonia.” The name Platonia shows up a few times in the history of human culture, and in wildly different contexts. It is the burial site of Peter and Paul under the Bascilica of St. Sebastian in Rome, a genus of tree in the Amazon rainforest, a fictional planet on a 60s kids’ sci-fi show, and the hypothetical place beyond time and space, containing every single configuration of what could happen (so named by theoretical physicist Julian Barbour).
The strained sampled organs and the heartbeat rhythm suggest something foreboding. But the strains of catharsis we’ve heard in “Deep Time” and “You Retreat Into Time and Space” also peek through in quick piano phrases. There is something of a release, a chance to relax, and to find space to breathe past the tension. Then, under the persistent heartbeat and the invading radio static, we are left with the residue of different worlds lingering in the back of our head. We sit with the stillness, wondering which one we prefer.
All images are from publicity material from Boards of Canada’s Inferno (2026), except for the image from the Protect and Survive program (1974).
Very insightful reflection on the album.