Boards of Canada - Tomorrow's Harvest (2013)

Amid the potentially new BOC album rollout currently taking place, I thought I'll revisit the last record they ever put out. "Tomorrow's Harvest" is over a decade old and this point, but its message has unfortunately aged like wine. Due to its ARG-drived rollout, it's regarded as one of the band's best work by true fans, but for more casual listeners it's often opposite. It's true that the album has this very weird, drab kind of sound, with the usual BOC trippyness and vibrant soundscapes being replaced with cold, sparse repetiveness, but I believe it is very much intended. Even in spite of that, that I'm not that huge fan of the record, even tho my opinion on it changed for the better after a recent relisten.

Before I begin the usual track-by-track schizorant, let's talk a bit about the concept of this album. It's essentially about the appcalypse... The tracks, their titles and the artwork tell the story about humans painting themselves into a corner (so to say) with the pollution and destruction of our planet and its ecosystem. The songs are full of loneliness, despair and hopelessness, which is exceptionally unusual for the band - which is the reason of this album being often times called BOC's weakest release. The first track here is "Gemini", which begins with this quirky OS startup sound type of melody, composed of 7 distinct, harmonised notes. This represents the biblical seven trumpets of appcalypse, which I always find haunting and fascinating. This is definitely the best way any BOC album starts! Honestly right now I can't even think of any better album openers that I've ever heard. After that one short vignette, the track meanders a lot though the textured tremolo drone sounds and weird melodies, and eventually just fades out.

"Reach for the Dead", the album's single is one of it's strongest parts. It conveys the appcalyptic vibe very well, at the same time also being an enjoyable ambient IDM track. I always liked it, but I don't come back to it all that often.

The tremolo-like arpeggiated pattern from "Gemini" comes back in the 3rd track, called "White Cyclosa". This song is an epitome why some people aren't into this album. It's repetetive, uninventive and simply just odd. Its looped sequence of sounds remains unchanged until the end of the track, while some ambience plays in the background. This is very un-BOC-ish! They're known for their creative sound manipulation, evocative, nostalgic soundscapes and all that, but here they deliver a boring, unaccessible track, that fails to engage with the listener. This is all by design tho! Despite in fact being uninteresting, "White Cyclosa" is one of the LP's most memorable moments for me. Also, the title is a really interesting curiosity. Cyclosa is a genus of spiders, known for their characteristic web constructs build using the body parts and corpses of their dead prey... Apart from that bringing enough eldritch horror imagery, in my mind it also seems to indicate an important issue of big, explotative corporations being an instrumental issue in the destruction of Earth... The "white" in the phrase "white cyclosa" might mean "white man", and the cyclosa genus connotation evokes the thoughts of relentless white man preying on other people and using them and fruits of their labor for building its looming constructs upon the dying Earth (which literally happens)... This is just my interpretation tho.

I've seen a lot of prasie around the web for "Jacquard Causeway" - it's often hailed as the best song on this LP. And while I get it, I don't really agree. The song is pretty creative - it's uneven, disjointed and it almost sounds broken down. The drumbeat has almost no connection to underlying, uncanny melodies. It fits into the album exceptionally well, but I don't come back to it, since it's too broken and creepy for my taste.

The unnerving spoken-word focused interlude "Telepath" leads way into "Cold Earth" - the most BOC-ish album track yet. It's an ok track, its classic "Geogaddi" sound and those smearing, cloudy synths cannot be mistaken for any other artist. Even the rapid vocal samples are back! The song is sandwiched between two interlude tracks, with the next one being "Transmisiones Ferox". It's title refferences "Coescha Transmisiones" website, that was an integral part of the album's rollout ARG. It reminds me a lot of "The Campfire Headphase" interludes in a lot of ways. I'm thinking like "Constants are Changing" or "Slow This Bird Down". It's similiarly alien and desolate and just sounds like it's playing from an old, broken tape.

Fittingly titled "Sick Times" is a straightforward IDM track, with not much going on along it's run. There's a lot of similar songs on this album and I always mix them up... It just shows how sonically limited the album may be at times. A lot of this songs unfortunately are generic sounding, to the point of even being somewhat forgettable... I've never thought I'd say something like that about any BOC song, but yeah...

The next track, "Collapse", tries to do that colorful synth arppeggio thing ("Roygbiv" vibes) but a lot darker. It fades to silence in a very atmospheric way and then gets hillariously interrupted by admitedly very silly sounding "Palace Posy". The contrast between those tracks (at least at a first impression...) feel uncanny and jading. "Palace Posy" is another disfigured mess of a song, similar to "Jacquard Causeway", but a lot more BOC-ish (the synths do the job). It kinda reminds me of some AFX tracks, especially stuff on "Richard David James Album" or "I Care Beacause You Do".

"Split Your Infinities" is again some IDM stuff. It's pretty evil sounding, with all the menacing voice samples and intimidating chords. Then we have "Uritual", which I also really enjoy for its darkness. It has some Hooper Bay's "Circle" vibes, with its cold, haunting drone. The next two track repeat the gimmick of atmospheric beat-focused track followed by more of an ambient, gloomy piece. "Nothing is Real" and "Sundown" continue this strong point in this album imo, especially the latter song. "Sundown" made me realise that this album's strength really lies in the interludes and less rhytmic tracks. These songs seem to fit the "end of times" concept a whole lot more...

We finally reached the sole hopeful spark of this dystopian record - "New Seeds". The song sounds like a movie soundtrack - it's really action-packed and cliffhanging . It just feels like a very important and crucial part of the music experience of "Tomorrow's Harvest". The seed motive that is used in the title of the record comes back in the title of the song, as a signifier of new hope and some last opportunity of humankind actually surviving the sick times. Unfortunately it's all for nothing, as the next track, "Come to Dust" continues the engrossing nature of the music, while conveying in it the ultimate downfall of our species...

All hope is lost forever for good in "Semena Mertvykh" - the last track of the LP. I love this track... It's cruel and relentless in its message, but this works exceptionally well! It's definitely my absolute favourite off this album and off the BOC's entire discography. The title "semena mervykh" is an incorrect transliteration of a russian phrase meaning "seeds of the dead" (it's incorrect because it should've been "myortvykh" as far as I understand), which conveys the message of absolute futility and ultimate fall of homo sapiens civilisation...

Overall the album is great. I definitely prefer the second half, although the first one has its gems too! It is an absolute must listen for any IDM fan, but due to it not being as vibrant and musically lush as other BOC releases, it's always overlooked and looked down upon. It being hailed as the worst BOC album does not mean that it's by any means a bad record. Yeah of course it has it's flaws - many songs may feel uneventful or overdone in their conceptual construction, but the album as a whole REALLY works. The whole rollout of it and the meanings behind the songs' titles and imagery is a fascinating story in itself - I won't be talking about it here because of abundance of this topic online (look up the album on Bocpages website!), but it's all so haunting and immersive, that it makes this record cinematic and enourmously huge in scale. I'm curious what the boys are preparing for us for the next album...