(Warp)
The Scottish electronic duo remain hugely influential – but their new album’s interrogation of religion is dubious, and the drum programming is worse still
This is the first album in 13 years from Boards of Canada, and from the opening notes – an analogue synth rising and falling like a sound effect in a forgotten 1960s radio play – you’re thrust back into one of the most instantly recognisable worlds in electronic music.
From 1995 debut EP Twoism onward, across four LPs and four more EPs, the Scottish duo – brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin – used the heavy gait of classic hip-hop beats to trudge through spectral ambient vistas, like spacemen sent through a time portal while still being tethered to the present. By grabbing samples from old public television and other vintage sources, they looked back at the utopian promise of the mid-20th century, while teasing out the latent kitsch and creepiness of these sounds.
