Scotland’s hugely influential electronic experimental sibling duo Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin return 13 years after their last LP, Tomorrow’s Harvest, with an epic 18-track collection that dissects the psychology of religion with distorted vocal samples and cut-ups across landscapes of dystopian synth textures and beats. Lead single and former Song of the Day Prophecy at 1420 MHz has a dark, heavy drumbeat and a mesmeric, menacing ambient slow build with mutated deep vocals related to some self-proclaimed God-like Jungian consciousness, and is also named after the deep space frequency used in the search for extra-terrestrial life. Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan has a fidgety and fat synth-wave landscape. Age of Capricorn, without the heavy basic beats, has a whispering chanting sound about MABUS, supposedly related to John Hogue’s interpretation of Nostradamus' writing, as predictions of a potential future Antichrist. It is perhaps timely response the far-right Christianity currently rife in the USA.
Father and Son is a minimalist, oddball cut-up piece of snippets of voices having confusions and crises of faith in terms of a contradictory dialogue: “I love you, but I love the Lord / More than I love any physical being / I think that's wonderful / But then why can't you bring that same feeling home? I really wish that I could do that / (No one ever knew that that was atypical) / What makes you think you can't do it? / Well, He said, "A man's foes will be they of his own household"/ Well, I hardly believe that your own father or mother or brother or sister would be your enemy / You're gonna call Him a liar?” By now it becomes clear that Boards of Canada are hardly fans of religious faith, but are still fascinated by what it does to individuals and society. All Reason Departs appears to have Christian nationalist philosophy (“the initiation of a new beyond … a great war must be fought”) expressed through demonic whisper. All Reason Departs is another devilish whisper over ambient sounds and intricate beats and bass lines, this time disturbingly quoting from Aleister Crowley’s Magick 4: “There is a magical operation of maximum importance / The initiation of a new aeon / Before man is ready to accept the Law of Thelema, the great war must be fought / This bloody sacrifice is the critical point of the world-ceremony of the crowned and conquering child / As lord of the aeon.”
Hare Krishna chanting floats up during the fairly basic beats and synths of Naraka. Short interlude track Memory Death is a dark disturbing ambience dotted with a beeping hospital heart monitor and buzzing insects. The cleverly inventive, gradually building The Word Becomes Flesh includes a sample of an old educational video about the development of the human embryo set against this robot-like body-popping electronica. Another intriguing interweave of voice comes on The Process, a crackly ambience using an AI-like female voice spouting random religious phrasing within a wash of long drone synth sound and a distant crowd. Penultimate track You Retreat In Time And Space is a more serene instrumental track, slow and spacey, with relaxing, celestial synth lines, before closer I Saw Through Platonia floats out on amorphous clouds and subtle heartbeat. It’s a fascinating, sometimes challenging listen across 70 minutes and 18 tracks, variously powerful and nebulous, dark, disturbing, dystopian and ethereal, and though not perhaps the album some may have hoped for, a bold, brave and welcome return from this highly creative pair. Out on Warp Records.
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