My first proper listen to Tomorrow’s Harvest, the new album by Scottish electronic music duo Boards Of Canada, was carefully planned. I decided to walk west along Brighton seafront from the mesmerisingly gaudy Palace Pier to the brutalist structure of the marina, pressing play on my iPod only once I was well clear of the crowds. This stretch of coastline is home to Volk’s Electric Railway – a family favourite – and a few bars, but even on a swelteringly hot day such as this I knew it would be near-deserted compared to the central stretch of beach.
This solo listening party was in stark contrast to the high-profile gathering in the wide open spaces of the Mojave Desert, where Warp Records treated a gaggle of fanatics to a preview of the new album. I’d always considered brothers Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin’s hazy, vaguely menacing music a private pleasure. Watching a live video stream of the Mojave gathering, I couldn’t help thinking it would have been a more effective statement for Warp to simply blast the new album out into the empty desert landscape. This would have been more consistent with the album’s pervasive theme of catastrophe and depopulation, not to mention Neil Krug’s eerie promotional video, also shot in the Mojave.
The further I walked along Brighton’s Marine Parade, the more I was drawn into the music. The buzzing drones and spiralling arpeggios of “Gemini”, “White Cyclosa” and “Reach For The Dead” were matched in intensity by the heat that caused the air to buckle and warp in the distance. The album’s title and sleeve photography had already brought to mind the desert-bound dystopias of 70s sci-fi cinema such as Phase IV, Capricorn One and The Andromeda Strain. By the time I reached the marina, a concrete behemoth situated just ahead of a building site and a patch of incongruous scrubland looking out to sea, I felt as though I had voluntarily snagged myself in a similar sun-kissed apocalypse.
Eoin and Sandison instill a sense of unease not through the stereotypically “dark” sounds favoured by many current electronic acts but with a carefully maintained ambivalence. Their visual aesthetic is based around light and colour. Their melodies are frequently beautiful but subverted by deliberately damaged textures, such as tape crackle or electronic interference. Both bright and mournful, Tomorrow’s Harvest speaks to survivalist fantasy of being the last on earth, while its scuffed sounds wordlessly evoke an impending collapse. As I sat looking seaward to the decaying strains of closing track “Semena Mertvykh”, I found myself suspended between terrifying freedom and thrilling dread.
Tomorrow’s Harvest has been the subject of a protracted and inventive promotional campaign involving codes, teaser videos, rumours and conjecture. It may therefore surprise those new to the duo’s music to find that the album provides ample opportunity for immersion in smaller, yet more profound, ways. A consummate work of sonic fiction, its engrossing endtime narrative is best experienced at a distance from the polyphonic frenzy of the internet and the music press – perhaps even from the rest of humankind.
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