Experimental Electronic Music
Boards of Canada return in unmistakable form, diving deep into the shadowy downtempo atmosphere that made them legendary — a hypnotic state of consciousness suspended between nostalgia, decay, and dreamlike transmission. “Introit” and “Prophecy At 1420 MHz” are the first two tracks unveiled from the forthcoming album Inferno, arriving May 29, 2026 on Warp Records.
If Tomorrow’s Harvest was the collapse of the physical world, Inferno is the processing of the digital soul. We have moved from a famine of the body to a harvest of the mind.
Boards of Canada today announce Inferno, their first full-length release in thirteen years, marking a significant return for the influential Scottish electronic duo. This forthcoming record expands their unmistakable sonic identity, introducing a darker, more intricately layered atmosphere that refracts their hallmark sense of warped nostalgia through a more shadowed lens.
Boards of Canada didn’t just shape how we hear music — they reshaped how we experience reality, and Geogaddi remains their most unsettling proof: a deliberately disorienting, symbol-laced descent where warmth masks dread and mystery is the message.
Boards of Canada’s Music Has the Right to Children stands as a quintessential cornerstone of downtempo electronic music—a seminal release that propelled the enigmatic duo of Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin into a boundless realm of nostalgic reverie. In this edition of our “Flashback” column, Anne Jackson revisits the album’s haunting landscapes, with particular focus on “Telephasic Workshop,” a track that encapsulates a paradoxical beauty: at once claustrophobic and transcendent in its sonic intricacy.
Here, time blurs. Languid pulses, dusky synth-lines, erratic vocal fragments, and serpentine grooves conjure a place half-remembered—at once familiar and untethered, a kind of sonic déjà vu.
Fresh from his music being picked up for a Ridley Scott Netflix production, Dalham brings the required noise in Cobra / And The Sun, a twin release from the estimable Castles in Space set to alter states across the planet.
Drawing comparisons to brothers Sandison and Eoin and a handful of like-minded artists such as Faex Optim, Skytree, Zachary Gray, Pentagrams Of Discordia, clocolan, Hanut Munson, The OST, Christ., and Sinerider, Sea of Suns maintains a grounded, elemental essence.
There’s red line, thin, but distinct, between different kinds of sounding—between soundalike and sound like, resemblance and redolence, imitation and influence; thus, though sometimes end products may sound similar, in essence they differ crucially.
Fluttering beats dissolve within ambient ice sheets, blurred samples, found sounds, and expressive atmospheric shadows that lurk in the background, encapsulating the entire cosmos in a drifting musical mashup.
A memorable snapshot of an era which many longtime Warp aficionados think of fondly as representing the very pinnacle of the label’s musical prowess, and for anyone wishing to delve further into Warp’s back catalog, a handy list of every WAP (singles and EPs with catalog numbers from 1 to 99) and WARP (albums with catalog numbers from 1 to 55) release up to that time was included inside the compilation’s CD booklet.
