When Isn't Nostalgia Poison? BOC: Inferno

Nostalgia is poison. So why do I like BOC so much? BOC's nostalgia isn't saccharine but complicated.  When remembering is blocked by a nostalgic concept, the past becomes a projection of the rememberer's wish-fulfillment fantasy. The general structure of this sort of fantasy projection is that of the fascist who imagines a past greatness, or a lost Eden, that never was to recover the past from a decadent present. It is a well worn and now all too obvious observation that "Make America Great Again," is a totalitarian dog whistle. But there is a sort of remembering that also enjoys imagining the past, but which includes those parts of the past that the nostalgic concept tries to screen out. The nostalgic concept can be rehabilitated when it is used to present the pass by way of contrast to how the nostalgic concept presents it. This dialectical way of remembering takes the concept and contrasts it with what it tries to repress about the past. BOC's uses of nostalgia are like this latter sort of dialectical remembering that includes the otherness that was previously suppressed by the screen memory of the concept, so that their uses of nostalgic musical concepts and samples highlight the menacing dissonance of their dips back into the "innocence" of childhood. I am reminded of Terrence Malick's "Tree of Life" when I think about how BOC does this. Malick created the most convincing depiction of childhood ever to be laid down on film because he allowed the cloudy nostalgia of his subject matter to by vitiated by the lurking, cloudy threat of violence and transgression. James and I are back at again. You're going to want to hear this one.

https://www.martinessig.com

Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

Transcript

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Yeah, now I think it's we rock. Sweet. You don't want to look at the notes? Oh no, I'm I I I uh I know what I think. I was more writing those for your benefit. So anyway. If you want to use them. Or you could just come up with your own your freestyle as well. My old man glasses. Alright, let's do it. We're talking a little soft, you gotta Okay. Alright. One, two, three. Hey James, how's it going? Fine. That's good. Thank you for uh agreeing to interview me for uh this uh Boards of Canada record inferno. I really appreciate that. You've heard it? I have. Yeah, and uh you want to offer some just general thoughts, I suppose. I think they're gonna change after I give my thoughts, but you know. Alright. Uh I heard the first single and I really did not like it. Oh, okay. The prophecy one. Yeah, and now I'm just more baffled at how it's such a polarizing record for a lot of people. Some who think it's the second coming, and other people who are just taking a lot of pleasure in dragging it. Yeah, yeah. And which camp do you find yourself in at this point? Somewhere in the middle. Uh-huh. You so you drag certain out uh parts of it and then you enjoy other parts of it? Yeah, it's fine. It's a fine record. It's a fine record. Alright, good. Alright, well, would you like to maybe in a formal way um ask me questions about what I think about it? What do you think about it, Marty? Um is that formal enough? Yeah, oh yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, I meant to say I think I meant to say informal way. Oh, okay. Yeah, like we're just two guys having a conversation. So yeah. But anyway, uh, so my thoughts. Thanks for asking. Uh you're very welcome. Yeah. I love it. Uh it's they've been a like real significant band for me since since the beginning. I had I have all their CDs uh up until up until now. I was still buying CDs at the time of tomorrow's harvest, so I don't anymore. But um I don't even know if they offer them any longer, but anyway, back in the 90s, they were a big deal. Um Warp was a big deal. Um I think Autiker uh kind of had something to do with getting them on, and uh I certainly knew Autiker, and then uh I actually liked or Auttecker, I don't know, sorry, Autecker, uh and um I certainly liked them, but then Boards Canada came along, I liked them a lot better uh because of a lot of reasons, but yeah. Just to be super clear, because we're old. We're old. You have the memory of going into a store and buying music as the right to children. You have that. That is a memory of mine. Uh so uh I'm from Chicago and um it's a very famous record store there uh called Gramophone. It's mostly like House and Techno Records, but they also had a big, you know, I guess hip hop plus trip hop kind of a deal. And I know that you like to classify boards of Canada to Canada as trip hop, but like for example, that was the first place I heard them playing DJ Shadow introducing, so that was a very big deal in Chicago when that came out. And uh he came and visited not too long after that and gave us a great show along with J. Rue the Damager. But uh that was a great show. Uh but uh you know we got we got some good hip-hop stuff coming through Chicago. It is mostly a house place, but um, and techno as well, but it's uh you know, plenty of good hip-hop there. Common was I think our first big star. But anyway, yeah, I it was one of those records where they were playing it not just at Gramophone, but in a lot of record stores. I mean, I guess you could call it broadly electronic music, and that was a big thing. Um I forget that thing that came out on Warp. They were two compilations. I think they're pretty famous. They might be called intelligent music or something like that or artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence, those were excellent. That's kind of like how I learned about Black Dog and just all what was happening in the world basically. And then yeah. I could totally do a podcast about those two cities. But I would love that. What's amazing to me is how I think those were 93, 94-ish. Yeah, but they were a big deal. And a lot of tracks don't hold up necessarily, but a fair chunk of it when I listen to it now, I'm like, this still sounds like the music of the future because it sounds really optimistic. Yeah, right, yeah. And it's harder to find that without it feeling like nostalgic, which does get into Boards of Canada, but right, yeah, and so the nostalgia of Boards of Canada was the first thing I obviously noticed about it, but it's not a straight um kind of a nostalgia, and that's what makes them interesting and what I like about them. So it's a nostalgia with a hint of menace or danger or discord or something like that, which is how I prefer my nostalgia. I don't like it the dumbass make America great way kind of a thing. So uh nostalgia is a tool of tyrants and is a tool of um absolutism of all kinds, and I think that um you know it's something that Boards of Canada was always very good at questioning, or at least having me question, but without being cynical, like you know, it wasn't just silly, so like my generation was into things and enjoying things uh completely cynically, ironically, whatever however you want to put that, going to really bad B movies and you know being MST3K, you know, making jokes about the movie the whole way through, whatever that kind of a you know cynicism that Generation X is known for. Uh this is not that kind of cynicism, and this is not the kind of you know, just kind of stupid nostalgia that isn't complicated. So that's what I've always liked about Boards of Canada. Um, I I never really thought of them as trip-hop. I definitely realize they use a lot of the same type of drums and a lot of the same type of uh nostalgic sampling techniques or whatnot, but I don't know. I've I've always really enjoyed it, and I just saw the album cover, and it was like these weird faceless family that kind of you know gave me the feeling of like, yeah, it's there's like this night these nice uh calm family situation on a vacation kind of tones, but like none of them have faces, so um, that's really uh scary, and that's the kind of vibe that I get from Boards of Canada for sure. So I want to make sure the camera can see these notes that Marty wrote up. No, I was writing them when I was listening to the record that you so nicely uh loaded onto my spite for me. Thank you. So it's interesting that listening to the record it generated these notes. Yeah, yeah. And reading these notes, I get the I definitely get the sort of potent, cursed, somewhat sinister energy that I feel like that album i is a try is trying to achieve. Not quite getting there in my mind, but these notes, goddamn. So in terms of nostalgia, you wrote, remembering is dangerous because it is open to letting in the demonic. But the demonic is openness. Oh, right, okay, good. Yeah, and I spelled uh I think I spelled demonic differently both times. One is the daemon sort of Greek way, and one is the more modern English demon sort of a way. And so my idea here again was that um well, I'll just go down my notes a little bit because I think it's a way to explain it. The Freudian screen memory is something that's been a very interesting concept to me. So Freud had this idea that sometimes the way we remember things um forms a screen over what actually happened or the deeper trauma that was actually present or the deeper, deeper menace or danger that was actually there. So that he called that a screen memory when you take one memory and you use it to cover over uh another memory so that you can't, you know, basically that's the way you know normal bullshit nostalgia works, where you just like remember the good old days, and it's like, you know, it's like we grew up watching Happy Days, for example, and um, you know, there was a lot of bullshit nostalgia for the 50s for whatever reason, and it seems to be back again, but like, and then I'm sure I wasn't alive in the 50s, but I'm sure that wasn't, you know, that wasn't the thing in the 50s either. So, you know, that's it's it's just kind of a lie uh a lot of times, and it's dangerous in that way. So that's kind of what the screen memory does, it sort of lies. And uh the the other thing I would say about the screen memory is that you and I have talked a lot about uh Deleuze's concept, Gill Deleuze's concept, of using a concept as a mold. And this is a very similar idea. So like if you take uh concepts are always things that are given to us from the past, because these are things that are already formulated to some degree. Um and if that we if we just use them to cover over what we're seeing, we never see uh anything but the past. We don't see all the difference of the presence, of the present, sorry, and so um it was a very similar idea to me where they're using memory here to uncover something that I always felt growing up as a child, actually, and I actually remember this. I never have been able to um I don't know, romanticize my childhood. Not that it wasn't a romantic childhood in some ways, there are many beautiful things about my childhood, but for me, I I just grew up with a lurking sense of evil, and I think for a couple different reasons, yeah, or a lurking sense of danger, menace, that something was going on that I didn't um wasn't fully aware of, and that I couldn't even look at because I had been taught to use something uh like a screen memory or like concepts as a mold. So uh just as an example, I grew up in the Catholic Church. This is somewhere in those notes too, but there was always this sense of like, oh, the priest is like the you know, the the prince of Christ, and like they're doing this magical, you know, transformation of the Eucharist, and like it's the body of God, and like they're so holy, and they're performing this, you know, amazing rite out of their purity or something like that. But I also grew up during like the height of a lot of the sex scandal. Not that it wasn't going on before, but it just well, actually, it really uh affected, you know, some of my friends a lot more than it did me. Uh that and it, but we none of us found out about any of it until after after we got back from college, really, because that's when it was really being dealt with in the 90s, but a lot of this stuff was going on in the 70s and 80s. And what was amazing was, and this is how a stream memory or concept as a mold works, it's like you're told this is what to see, and so you just have to see it, but you have this uneasy sense, something going on underneath it. Um, and so I was on camping trips uh with a pedophiliac or whatever they're called, priest, pedophile priests. Um, I wasn't molested myself, but like I, you know, even at the time, I know this is true. I remember this. It wasn't that I I could not like be like, oh, it's father, you know, this dude, father whoever, he's taking us on this great camping trip. It's like the kind of thing little Catholic boys do or whatever, and you know, this is all like very romantic and lovely, and we're on an adventure. Because I because and as it turned out I was right, there were there were things going on with some of the boys there and him that um I couldn't allow myself to see or didn't have the capacity to see because there was all this uh concept as a mold bullshit going on where like I have to see this trip and I have to frame this priest in this kind of and I have to pray my faith in a certain kind of way that um doesn't allow me to talk about uh or or see what's actually happening around me. And so I I just I really get that vibe a lot in um boards of Canada. Probably maybe not that sinister, but I don't know, pretty sinister, frankly. Like so like there's never like uh an auditory um scene that they paint. Uh and and the and the textures that they use are PBS samples, basically. And and and there again is another great example of how um so so I get all I get that PBS feeling. I get like that this is I mean I remember thinking even in the 70s when I was a kid, like these things are really psychedelic and kind of weird, and like uh the characters are a little bit bizarre. Uh they certainly weren't like you know the people or the reality that I that I lived in or whatever. And actually that was one of the criticisms that came out about PBS shows is that they were like sort of like uh creating attention span deficit with all their weird cuts and psychedelic whatever and music and whatnot. So it's not a new it's obviously it's not a neutral thing for boards of Canada to be using those kinds of samples, at least for me, and they're obviously from their generation too. It is curious to me that people from I don't know, other generations are able to get anything out of it just because those samples are very specific to that time and place, at least for me. But even on PBS, you know, like kind of famously, there was all kinds of negative things going on behind the scene, however positive they tried to tried to be. And I remember like learning in the early 80s that David, uh one of the characters on Sesame Street, had to be taken off of uh Sesame Street. Uh I was told it was because he was um a drug addict, and which was pretty scandalous. Turns out he he kind of was, but he was more because he was psychotic and he had had a number of psychotic breaks on set, and like I guess had even tried to bite a child. And then later on, this was a direct part of my child because I I wasn't watching Sesame Street any longer, but like um Elmo very famously was invented and played by Kevin somebody, uh I forgot his name is, but uh I'll think of it later. But anyways, he um and he was uh accused of at any rate, I don't know how far it went, but he had to be taken off as well. Need to find somebody else to do Elmo. Uh Kevin Clash is maybe his name. I saw a documentary on him one time, but anyways, so uh and he was um you know involved with a uh in a in a relationship uh with a with a minor as well. So um I say all this to say like we weren't allowed to see any of that stuff at the time. We weren't allowed to say any of that stuff at the time, but there was all of this stuff going on, and so their treatment of childhood is just fascinating to me because it it includes that kind of demonic presence. Now, on the positive side, and I don't think this is the only way for something to be demonic, is for it to be evil, because that's why I spelled it the other way as well. In the Greek sense, a daemon is this kind of like muse or spirit that um allows you to, I don't know, see things or open up the world in a different kind of way. Famously, Socrates had a daemon, and this is what made Socrates the you know ask all these questions and become the gadfly of Athens and eventually get executed, um, because well, in in a way that he weirdly went along with. But anyways, he um had a daemon, and it was you know this spirit, this free spirit within him. And so, like, you also, when you remember, you see that the past, you know, had more going on than uh you thought at first. So, like, you know, one of the things that we talk about a lot in AA is that you know we can't um change our past. Uh, but one of the interesting things that we do when we review it or go over it is that we change our relationship to it and we allow ourselves to see things that were going on there that we didn't see at the time, and that maybe we have the capacity to see in a different way now. And so that our the way that we relate to our past actually changes how we are in the present and how we project ourselves into the future. So there's also uh the daemonic uh opens up um dimensions of our past that are you know beyond just um I don't know, uncovering some evil. Um trauma is uh you know something that can be uh a break. Uh trauma is something that can be uh something that just breaks one down. Uh so it it's it's uh it can, you know, uh again with Gios Deleuze, a phrase that we both like to use. Uh well maybe I make me more than you, but deterritorialization is traumatic. Yeah, it's it's it it means uh making you know clearing away uh you know what had become cluttered or whatever, and or what had become routinized, uh what had become hierarchical and arboreal or or whatever, so that you can um you know allow for something new to happen. I mean, this is part of Zeleu's idea of concept creation, new concepts is to like make sp make new space, make a way uh for something new to occur, to come. Uh, and so you know, I don't know how deeply boards of Canada are into um uh uh are into philosophy or anything like that, but it sort of seems like they are sometimes, but they but they leave their tracks hidden enough so that it's very hard to um know you know where they're coming from or what they're actually thinking, and they just kind of do a very nice job of leaving things uh open to you. Uh I would just say that also um uh because you asked a relatively simple question, but I I went on a little bit longer than I intended to. I was thinking also of Terrence Malik's Tree of Life, which which is often thought of as like the best film. And it really does carry this vibe of the kids running around in summer, kind of like at all the angle, all the camera angles are at kids' level and that kind of stuff, and all all the things that the adults are doing are kind of mysterious. So in Tree of Life, Terence Mallock was somehow able to capture the exact sense to me, at any rate, that boards of Canada are able to. So it's certainly nostalgic, but famously in Tree of Life, there's something kind of hard to even name because as a child you can't name it going on with the father. He he may be uh somewhat abusive, you see him screaming and yelling and becoming violent at certain times, you don't know you know what the menace is exactly. Um, and the ultimate example, although it's kind of unwall unwatchable for me, was this movie uh Skinamarink that came out where uh you're just in a house, there and it's it's very eerie, it's very 1970s, maybe late 70s, early 80s, and there's clearly something bad going on in the house, but it's from a child's perspective, so you get this kind of nostalgic playing games and you know, just like doing kid things, but then you also get these very sinister hints that something uh off is also happening at the same time, and and so I it's a pretty unwatchable movie, but I I get that sort of flavor from Boards of Canada too, and especially their uses. I don't know what they do or how they do their magic, but man, do they they they have really figured out how to make a synthesizer sound like the most psychedelic 1970s, early 80s PBS program. Um, yeah, and it's just like a place that you want to check out for sure, but that like you're not gonna go back to. It's so like you know, in whatever way you can return to that childhood or that through nostalgia, in a sense, you're not going back to it in the way that you originally experienced it because there's all these minor minor chords, minor tones, dissonances, like nothing is ever straight. Uh, and you know, and just things are as expected because they're because they are this exact sound of PBS to me, but at the same time they're off. Everything's off a little bit, and that kind of allows me to like like look at that time uh as both wonderful, but also um just a lot of gnarly things going on at the same time that you know uh are hard to look at or hard to remember. So that's the danger. Uh that's the that's the daemon or the demon that you might encounter, um, you know, and it might be the same thing depending on how you look at it through a through a different shift of life, like just how evil, whatever it is, that's lurking around the corner in your childhood is the way that you talk about nostalgia helps me understand now why I'm both kind of hot and cold on the album. So going back to this idea of memory and the idea that memory is malleable, that we change how we relate to the past, right? You know, it's very easy to just constantly relitigate it or dine out on the past and trauma and let that define us, but we can go back and have a more active or have more agency over how we engage with it. And that can be a very slow process. But the way that you're describing Boards of Canada as being rooted in a very particular moment or generation that you and I both belong to of a generation raised by an arboreal hierarchical monoculture. Like I was raised by a television, mostly, right? And that was a very specific moment where we can all refer to the same shows, refer to Sesame Street, refer to whatever. Whereas now I think that's very, very challenging because it's all just been completely splintered. So to say that they're coming from that generation and then showing that there was this uneasiness that you sensed. Because I think as a child, the world is inherently a little sinister and filled with, you know, possibility and wonder and also danger. So there is a question of I don't understand how everything works. And certainly we grew up in an age of you know white vans and stranger danger and all these like overblown. Satanic panic was another big one as well. But they all had they were just like kind of like viruses that went across the playground, or you know, it was more urban legend, it was less just internet madness, you know, so there was a little bit more truth to these or sense that these things that we were afraid of might be true. Anyway, I think there's an interesting doubling of nostalgia that explains my reaction to the album, where if you look at them as being raised maybe in the 70s or early 80s, and those are the formative memories, and then they go back to that and strip mine it for especially in the mid-90s, what is like the music of the future, the music of the new millennium, you know, this electronic music, and it's all disembodied, decontextualized, and feels new and interesting. Fast forward to 2026, where we've all been brainwormed and our attention is just completely shredded by the internet. And I think the reason there's such a polarizing reaction to the album is because there's another type of nostalgia occurring for a monocultural event. Now, granted, relatively small, but the fact that anyone I know who has passing interest in electronic music is aware of the Boards of Canada. And I could, and I'm sure you could too, I don't mean this is, but I think we could both rattle off a lot of names in terms of like ontology or music that are doing this way better than Boards of Canada ever did. Yeah. But you wouldn't know them, I wouldn't know the ones you mentioned. You know, there's just you know, whether it's the Caretaker, the Denji Hundred, whatever it is, but it's just they're all the it doesn't have the same monocultural force of Boards of Canada on warp coming back, mailing people creepy VHS cassettes. And so suddenly we're thrown back into nostalgia for like, oh, I remember what that was like back in the mid-90s or late 90s on Napster when we were looking, oh, that's a fake leak, that's a you know, there was this sort of anticipation, and we missed that. We never have that anymore. So it's weird that through their act of nostalgia, they've created a new nostalgic event. Nice, nice, very nice. And that's where it might leave me a little cold because when they dropped that first VHS tape, and it was just basically it was pure ambient, there were no drums or anything, and it was just that hexa hexagon coming down on all this footage of I think violence and riot and panic, and then eventually people in states of worship, and it was just this kind of holy tone, and that had so much weight to it, so much force. I mean, it did kind of have like the space odyssey monolith feel to me. Yeah. And I was like, oh god, this new album, what are they gonna do after all this time? Then when I listened to it, I was like, oh, okay, we're doing pretty much the same thing that you did in the 90s, whereas I kind of expected like to use this nostalgic monocultural moment to take us someplace new. And that was probably an unfair expectation. But that video did seem to sort of suggest we're back and now we're gonna speak to the current moment. But I feel like the album itself is still kind of trading in the PBS and the televangelists and stuff. That feels still like a very uh pre-2000 moment. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I mean, we can talk about some of those because look, some of those samples are a little bit different than things they did in the past. Yeah. Although, you know, they're they're definitely creating the same kind of a vibe or whatever. And I think it's both, I mean, it's obvious, but to put an asterisk of we're both American, and they're talking about BBC children's programming, which is even more bananas than like whatever we saw on BBC. I kind of know what you mean. I've seen some of those weird programs before, just beyond Bazaar or whatever. Um, but like not much, but a lot of the you know, the uh Scottish not British, I think. Uh yeah, Scottish. Well, they actually apparently, I think their father had a job in Canada for a year or two or something like that. So they did spend some time in Canada. Uh yeah, it it is a reference to Canadian public radio, if I understand correctly. Or not Canadian uh uh public broadcasting in general, basically. Um so uh anyway, but um let's talk first about the uh um the the track that you really disliked with uh all of a sudden forget his last name, but it's Nasser as his last name. And he's he's um he's jacked into some kind of voice modulator that's like totally um so it starts off kinda boards of Canada E, and I I will say that a lot of things that get cra uh um classified as electronica or trip hop does could be liable to the charge of Orientalism uh the in the Edward Saeed sense. So like you definitely get like sitars and and like that kind of a thing, and then you get a uh you know, he's I don't really know a lot about Nasir, uh the the sample guy, the guy who sampled, apparently he's some kind of philosopher or something like that, but clearly uh um Middle Eastern um Saeed is his first name, I think, and uh uh maybe Hussein Nasir or something like that. I I didn't know about him until the sample. Uh and so, anyways, his he's actually to give context for the speech, he's giving a speech about disenchantment, it sounds like, to me. So it's like he's basically talking about how we are just limiting our consciousness uh to such a degree that we're gonna be left with nothing. But the way they sampled it was almost the opposite, or at least communicated the opposite of what uh he was actually trying to say, because his thesis actually sounds a lot of like Boards of Canada thesis, which is like trying to re-enchant the world but not being dumb about our re-enchantment, so that it's not. Maybe I should make this uh distinction that might be helpful, something we've talked about many times, the primary naivete versus the secondary naivete. So again, I have no idea what their philosophical background is, if they even know anything about that. But this is definitely not a primary naivete where you go back to some primary Edenic perfection. This is definitely a secondary naiv naivete where you go back into some more uh I guess spiritual state, but as a full adult, not as uh not as like just a spiritualized child or something like that. And so I I would it sounded to me, just listening to the guy's actual speech, that that's kind of where he was coming from, because there's this this big thing right now, this big movement called like uh the meaning crisis, and there's all these people talking about how we've basically fucked ourselves out of any like sense of spirit and enchantment in the world, and so there's this desire to like try to re-enchant the world somehow, and there's a whole other people that said the world have never been disenchanted, that capitalism is a kind of enchantment, it's a kind of religious practice, and all this other kind of stuff. Consumerism is like more religious than religion, and so there's like all there's all this swirling around, I think, in um in Boards of Canada, but I think they want to escape uh some of that. And and so some of their sample choices are fascinating. So the ones you the thing that you that hits you over the head is he's saying something about absolute nothing or like and true or absolute truth, maybe I don't even know what it is, but like it's uh the way it's sampled, and for you it just was like super annoying and obvious and abrasive. For me, I kind of like got this as like, okay, this is supposed to be the voice of like some kind of a god who's like the I don't know, the god who sucks, basically, who's like telling people what to do and what to think. But again, once you look at uh what he's actually saying, if you actually go and research the sample, he's actually saying something that accords with the kind of secondary nettevate that you know we would hope somebody is. So he's not a fundamentalist looking for return to like old-timey religion or some shit like that, you know what I mean? It's as far as I can tell at any rate. So not to put too much on him, but it is one of those things where like your perspectival shift really matters um uh a lot. And so like I kind of like that weird voice thing that he were doing, like robotic machinic voice. So it's like to me the the machinic voice that we live with every day uh that that urges us to uh consume and uh expend ourselves, um, you know, what we've called in the past toxic positivity, type stuff. So yeah, I don't know if that's um but that's where I'm coming from in that song. And I actually like the song too. Like, so like uh even though, yes, it has some perhaps orientalist uh, you know, and even the you know, white guy hip hop is what trip hop, I guess. You know what I mean? So there's like so like yeah, I think it was a moment though, which was very 1990s, right? I mean, you know, we don't say Middle East, we say West Asia. Like, you know, a lot has changed in terms of how we look at things. Good. A lot of good things. At the same time, I think in the mid-90s there was just this sense of optimism, you know, of the information superhighway, and with electronic music, you never see the face of who made it, you don't know where it came from, it's completely anonymous, and it just becomes almost post-modernism and it's extreme death of the author, where we can just borrow a little this, a little of that, and make this sort of global music, right? Which then some of it aged okay, a lot of it did not age well, you know, over the past 20 years now we've changed how we think of things. And uh it burned in in the in the book. All the way back for sure. I'm just saying with trip hop at that moment, I think it was more of like the psychedelic globalized, you know, globalization sounded like an exciting thing in the 90s. You know, I I think it'd be hard to make a case in the same way today. So I just feel like the the mood has shifted, you know. But the reason it was called, which is such a dumbass term, like you know, trip hop at the time, I think, was the idea of it's no longer location specific, it's going global. It's part of like, you know, electronica, it's part of, you know, approaching the millennium. You know, I think there's just an optimism and a weird sort of polyglot desire behind it. That was that was interesting and now looks like a little naive. Like when you look at modernism in the 20s, you're like, yeah, World War II is right around the corner for you guys. You know, I think it's kind of the same thing, you know, where we're like, no, this is all gonna the internet is gonna completely make us all crazy. It's not gonna. I mean, there were TED talks 15 years ago about how, you know, social media will make us a more compassionate society because we'll know strangers and you know, you're just like, oh my god, that you know. So I think it belongs to that that camp of ideas, you know. Uh but the the reason that particular that first single let me down after the exciting videotape was alright, the first two minutes, I'm like, you know, heavy drums, good production, whatever, not that I care that much about that sort of thing. And then they throw in some kind of Kirish guitars, and it was pretty exciting. And then this voice comes in, like, I am God, or whatever. And I was like, man. And the track rests on that, and I feel like the track is sort of nudging me in the ribs, saying, Do you see the dissonance between like this voice talking about and I'm like, yeah, and I this is gonna make me sound like such a snob, and if it sounds good, I'm fine with it. This is what's gonna do it right here. Yeah, this is the one. But the moment I heard it, it made me think about like way before, not way before, but years before Boards of Canada, like green velvet sampling Preacher Man over at a heavy house beat, you know, and you're hearing a preacher preach with this just like thumping. Well, house music was very nostalgic in the same sample disco. But they were pulling like you know, news footage of cameras ready, prepare to flash, you know, whatever they were doing, but they were pulling that, and the dissonance between that and where it was played and the music itself was just crazy, right? I also thought about um I mean the recording is great, but and I think it was dramatized well then. Was it Julian Schnabel's Basquiat? But you know, Basquiat in the 80s calling all these suicide hotlines and putting it over a drum machine. Oh wow. I mean it was you know, and it's like a really cool kind of b-boy break. I mean, it's a really nice beat, and then you just hear this, you know, are you okay? Are you going to kill yourself? And you know, so it just felt like, yeah, we're doing that again. You know, and I'm fine with that, but I just feel like in 2026, and especially giving everything that's going on now, I just feel like there might be more interesting ways to speak to a disenchanted age than to take, look at this funny sample and it's appearing in an unexpected context. Yeah, I that said I'm all for the project of enchanting a disenchanted age, which seems like their overarching goals, so you know, I want them to have at it. Yeah, kind of to your uh your very interesting thesis about like this strange loop of nostalgia back to their original nostalgia or whatever in the 90s or whatever, which I think is kind of what you're saying here again. Um so like I I think going back to that um 90s nostalgia, sample nostalgia. I mean, that was the thing that I loved about sampling. That's it, it's my favorite kind of music, like of all. Like, I love sample-based collage style pastiche. Like, I it's my favorite kind of art, it's my favorite kind of everything. It's I it could be might just be because of how I grew up and you know, and the area I'm from or whatever, but like that is the thing that that changed the most in my lifetime was that Akai 1200 sampler that everybody got and made music from or whatever, and it just it allowed to revisit the past but different. It allowed it to chop up the past or whatever and like put it together in different pieces in different ways or whatever, so that it was the past, but it was the past with difference. And so this is the whole repetition with difference thing that that that is important to me. So the question is is can you really repeat, do this thing that was done in the 90s in a way that is meaningful again? Um, which which uh so you're you're you're kind of calling bullshit on, and I'm thinking, you know, maybe, maybe not. It's just like um I'm thinking more um I don't know, it just it just either works or it doesn't for you, I would say. Like, and so and so like for me, um a lot of people I I would not have wanted them to go in some totally new direction. So actually, um we brought up Shadow earlier, DJ Shadow. Like, I only like that introducing era stuff. After that, I hated it. Like, and it was trying to be like doing like modern hip-hop and stuff like that. I just stand up and play the hits phenomenon of like I know you for this, I want you to do that. But I think let me reframe it a little bit. Maybe it's not even so much the nostalgia thing on top of nostalgia feedback loop. I think it's also and some of it works, like the Boards of Canada father and son track. I've never heard a track that's so fucking re just hellaciously stupid, and yet it's also really sinister at the same time, and that's a pretty tough line to tread. So I think they do it all the time, and that's what I like about them. But there's still an uneasiness in me where it feels like, especially in 2026, to sample televangelists and people saying like earnest but kind of crazy things about God, that feels like punching down to me. Especially when we're contending with, I mean, I've had more conversations about with you and every you know, with people about the soul and about humanity and humanism and religion after the rise of AI in the past year or two. And so then to go back and be like, televangelists are kind of funny, like it just feels like, yeah, sure, if you want to do that in 2026, that's cool, but I'm not gonna say that this is like, you know, some bleeding edge shit, you know, which is I don't think it's bleeding edge, but I mean there is so that particular sample is interesting to me. Like a lot of times they went for more weird culty things. So when so later, I mean actually it was right before that. No, it was right after that track, which is ever there's the one where they used the Hare Krishna samples or whatever. To me, like that's more what they were doing in the past. It's it was interesting to see them go direct Christianity. Yeah, it's definitely a lot more legible. Yeah, yeah. So like, and also um, okay, so when um they're doing the whole, so this is called the four laws in in uh like Christian proselization, where a Christian comes up to you and says, like, um, you know, like do you know, you know, where you're gonna go after you die and with a hundred percent certainty or whatever? And and you know, I mean it just is so like it's just like this very obnoxious thing or whatever. Um, and so then you see somebody who is um you hear somebody rather, I don't know where they got that sample, but it's maybe it must be from some Christian propaganda shit, televangelist shit. I mean I'll send you to Candy. Like, I mean I like because or yeah, my wife just hates that song. But I like it because it reminds me of spent way too much time in the mid-2000s driving around the country late at night, listening to crazy Christian religious uh coast to coast AM, right? You know, like they found Atlantis is somewhere under Nevada, you know, that kind of shit. And it sounds like they just took any re any random midnight radio call and show with a preacher and just ran it through a meat grinder. So like I could I I I feel like I've even heard that conversation of my son is a sinner, but I love the Lord more than my son, you know, this kind of Abrahamic thing, or I don't know if that's the right reference point, but well, I was thinking too of that one, but also the one uh where the person is actually like accepting Jesus as their Lord and Savior or whatever kind of thing. And it's kind of interesting to me because like that is so cliched and awful. Like to me, that's like the sound of like hell, basically. And and and and like that's the sort of thing that I went, unfortunately. I was my my history of religion's background wasn't always uh fueled by the the best things, and and a lot of it was to combat that kind of Christianity. Um and so, anyways, so but like what they do, and this is like the point that I'd like to make, and I just think you either buy it or you don't, is you can almost see like the joy in giving your life to Jesus in that in that in that uh in that sample, uh, and with the music and stuff like that, but then there's always that sinister tone underneath it that like you know makes it um discordant so that so that you can kind of see that they're not that they that they want it both ways, and I like that because they're acknowledging the power of this for people. I mean, because there are people whose lives were truly screwed up and then they found Jesus and got all crazy with that, but like they uh came, um I don't know, had a better life, actually, you know, in some in a lot of ways. They weren't like on the street like selling drugs or whatever they were doing before. So they there are there are transformation stories like that. So it's like you can't just totally you know get rid of it, but so so there's that, but then there's also like the desire, like you know, I know from being raised in the church how much damage that stuff has done. And I, you know, and and I've been thinking a lot about like some of the doctrines that really damaged people, and that includes this idea that you know Jesus is the only way and you know, eternal conscious torment and all this other crap that um I was uh you know was it was was was around me at the time. Um and and as you said, a lot of the conspiracy theory stuff. I uh one of the samples later on is somebody like counting, I guess it's a sort of like uh a numerology thing, not numerology, I forget what they call it. Yeah, maybe it is numerology where they map on, they were like mapping, it was like some conspiracy thing around the time of Obama when they were mapping his name onto Osama bin Laden or something like that. It was like all that kind of like he's a secret, you know, agent for you know uh whatever, and he's like, you know, gonna bring about like the the downfall of Christian civilization or something like that. Yeah, by controlling the weather through a machine that he built at the foot of the Rockies. Right, yeah, anyway. Yeah, so like you just see so much of that. What I'm really struck by is I love how you're hearing that Boards of the Canada Boards of Canada album more than the album itself. And I should clarify for god forbid if anyone's still paying attention to this, but I've only listened to it twice, the full album. The first time I was like, eh, this is corny, I don't really like it. Then I took it for a run and just got lost in the sound of it all and the design of it, and I was like, this is actually pretty cool. And so I'm like fine with it. I'm very neutral on the album. Uh some tracks I like a lot better than others, which is how it goes. So that's why I'm kind of shocked by these extreme reactions to it. But I do think your reading of it is so much more generous of the idea of. They're trying to show the the joy, maybe even the peace that faith brings, you know, when they're sampling these radio callers to some evangelical show or whatever it is. And I don't hear that. I feel like sarcasm. I feel like inherently by taking someone professing their faith, putting it over a break beat, on an album called Inferno, no less, but it's inherently putting it in quotes, you know. And so I don't really hear that generous, generous spirit. And I don't know what that would sound like, but I'm glad you're I really love your interpretation of it. So well the reason why is I I just I mean, there's so there's a sort of like almost crowlian turn towards the end of the record, to me at any rate, where there is like and and in the speech of that guy, um, last name Master or whatever, uh you know, he's talking about some kind of return of magic, you know, to the world or whatever. Um, return to childhood again. Like there, so like I I just know from their work, not from like even I mean, and from stuff they said, frankly, that they're not that cynical about religion or faith. But this is where I think you are stuck on boards of Canada as a concept. You know, like if I played that album for you and just said, hey, a friend sent me this thing they made. Yeah, you're right. You know, I would think immediately the first thing you'd think is there being like typical Generation X. Yeah, I just feel like that's where we argued about that first track where I wanted to like it so much, and I was like, eh, you know, it's not for me. And I was like, actually, no, I think it's objectively not great with these samples and what they're doing at the end. But I feel like because it was Boards of Canada and come came freighted with this sort of and I mean more power to them. I mean, to have all these people just ciphering the little samples they put in and you know, creating this mythos around it, we need more of that. So I'm happy to see that happening. But again, I think it's because it's Boards of Canada it gets this closer reading. Yeah, oh for sure. But a lot more forgiveness. But but kudos to them for a lot more criticism in some way, yeah. Like you said, like leaving and and being very deliberate. I mean, on the one hand, I could be very cynical about this too, but like leaving these little like Easter egg breadcrumb things throughout the throughout the uh ages. I don't even know they're doing that though. Uh but I mean well they they would they would often like like leave like instructions for how to like hear a song that they've never you know you can get it like if you like follow these clues or whatever, and like it is a game to like figure out where they got these samples from and that kind of stuff. Um but like that is a way of re-enchantment for me, yeah. So that so that you're making up a kind of mythology that you know has to be to some degree based on the past, but the past with some introduce introduction of difference to it, and so that I I definitely hear that you say this has definitely all been done. Like it was done by Boards of Canada in Music Has the Right to Have Children or whatever in the first place. So like I I I get that. I I do think though that one of two things. One, um, there's still more to be done with it, because I don't really know where else to go. We've talked about this a lot of times. Right, exactly. Like, like I don't like, I don't know what else to do. Like, um I can't and so that's one thing. Um because you still need because even with this uh critique of concepts as a mold, you still need concepts. You're just using them differently to frame difference or to a frame something new. So that if you're gonna take something from the past, uh, you know, in in sample based music, and frame it in a in the present, you know, for the present, you're kind of either doing one of two things. You're showing the continuity between um you know the past and the present, or you're showing like a repetition with some kind of difference from the past. So that's you know, that's the main, I don't know, main potential that that that they're trying to tap into, I think. Yeah, and I sound crabby about Boards of Canada. Maybe I am, but I I think this clarified something for me. It kind of goes back to like maybe a rejection of the sort of hero model of history or the great man theory of history. Um and I think it's the same thing with Boards of Canada, where I don't think they're doing anything particularly special. And honestly, not even anything that musically interesting. But I think they manage to, whether it's through the hexagons, through the names, through the long periods between albums, whatever it is, there's a savviness to it for sure. But then you see people reading into it and responding to it. So what I see is people wanting to be enchanted, wanting to look for the puzzles, wanting to look for the secrets. And they love the channel. So I think the fandom and the mythos around it is the really interesting bit. I don't think Boards of Canada, when I look at that music itself, is actually what's generating it. I think it just became a handy vector that's tapping into something that people really want to participate in and experience. And that I love. Right. It's just the music itself. I'm like, eh, you know, I wish, you know, maybe Richie Hawts consume. I'm gonna be whatever. I wish other albums got that same reaction. They managed to find a spike in your own. But are uh yeah, but I just feel like the music itself isn't as special as the reaction around it and like the craving for a sort of futuristic or modern or new kind of mode of looking and finding connection and mythmaking. And I love seeing that around it. I just wish the music itself lived up to it. Yeah, maybe it can never be. Access, I'm saying, not excess, but anyways, um, and and and so like you know, and they've and they've I think worked pretty hard to do that. I mean, including not being willing to give an interview for this one. Um it was my understanding, um, and I and I also love uh tomorrow's harvest, but the in an interview, like, they said, you know, like we've become more nihilistic over time or whatever, or something relatively, I don't know, open like that. Who knows what that means altogether, but you kind of get it listening to Tomorrow's Harvest. But like um then everybody's interpretation of it was oh, this is their you know, final nihilism or whatever, like, and so um they had influenced so much, you know, the interpretation that I think they just it's kind of nice that they are now just like not only not going to give interviews where they don't tour the record or whatever. Um I'll just say the last, and this is maybe the ending I I would I I hope, uh, or I think the you know, when we went to um um Godspeed, uh I I just was so blown away by how I mean I felt like I had been at a secret occult ritual, which is something that um Boards of Canada is always like portraying, and that's the kind of sinister left-handedness of of a lot of the you know undertones of the whole thing. Like you go to one of their shows and you know the food. It was a religious experiment, I felt like it had been a chance. But I feel like they're doing the thing, whereas I feel like Boards of Canada is commenting upon the thing and not actually generally. Well, I'll listen to it for a third time. Absolutely. Yeah. So I mean, there are of there are very few, and and and just the fact that there are so few people who have any concept about how to even try, what direction to even go in. I mean, because again, like if you if you look for even models from the past, I mean, and not that distant past, like let's talk about Golden Dome very quickly, or or Crowley or Theosophy, or any of that stuff, trying to re-enchant uh the world, uh it just goes inevitably wrong. It almost always winds up turning into a sex cult of some kind or another. But it gets back to oh, I mean the idea that you cannot have sort of this like top-down faith. It has to be generated from the crowd, you know. And that's what I see with the Boards of Canada response where the people are absolutely keeling over, you know, so excited about this new record. It's like people are waiting for a thing to map that emotion or that desire onto. Yeah, yeah. I just wish it was a better thing. You just you just uh wish it was Godspeed, I guess. Well, though although then all then everybody wouldn't know about Godspeed and I don't know, it's although Godspeed is uh probably not as accessible, of course. Famously used uh samples of preachers uh in the 90s and all that. I just feel like they just they just do the same thing. Everybody else does generate a mythic experience around it and you're participating into it, but they're not actually saying like, oh, we're talking about cults and faith and you know all this stuff. Whereas with Boards Canada does feel like there's a constant wink or nudge about the stuff they're referencing. Yeah, I don't I don't know. Um we stop to to be carried forward in other formats later. Thanks for sticking with us to the end, everybody who did. Yeah, I mean mom at the end of mom. I thought there was a candle maybe.