Any Physical Being

Boards of Canada “Father and Son”

This is my best attempt to summarize the themes of Boards of Canada’s fifth full-length album Inferno after less than a week of obsessive listening: It’s broadly about how most people can sense the existence of some sort of God, but trying to understand what God is takes them in very different directions – scientific rationalization, all manner of religious devotion, fascistic cult behavior, occult philosophy, apocalyptic dread, psychedelic exploration, overt rejection of God. There’s no thesis or argument, there’s no plot or moralization. I think of it as an abstracted audio documentary, a collage of vignettes and references to moments and ideas that fit together intuitively but deliberately avoids a statement. What statement could there possibly be? The point is not knowing.

“Father and Son” is the track that pulled me in first, and I heard it without any context for its sample sources or the broader concepts of the record. I was inititally responding to it in purely musical ways, fixating on the drum programming and eerie keyboard tone, the odd musicality of how Mike Sandison had edited the vocal samples, and the fascinating intonations of the people speaking in the samples. Sandison has long had a great ear for surreal vocal clips – go back to “Aquarius” for a mind-bending utterance of the word “orange” – and there’s some peculiar magic to these voices, one very stern but warm, and the other so sheepish, but both imbued with a very American strain of wholesomeness.

The source of this dialogue was revealed rather quickly, as Boards of Canada listeners are apparently very talented audio detectives. It’s an exerpt from a 1971 Man Alive documentary called The Jesus Trip, which investigates the Children of God cult in its early days. It’s from a sequence in which a man visits his son at the cult’s compound and attempts to reason with him, with some hope of bringing him back home. It’s a heartbreaking scene in which a very stoic mid-20th century father tactfully speaks to a hippy son who has been programmed to turn against him.

The line that jumped out at me when I was approaching this purely as audio – “I really don’t think so” – is gutting in context. The father asks his son if, based on how he’s lived and raised his family, he has acted as a man who’s accepted Christ in his heart. The younger man responds “I really don’t think so” with a sort of wormy tone. You can hear uncertainty in his voice, but it’s nothing to do with his judgment, which seems entirely sincere. There’s an obvious weakness in this man, a deference to outside forces. He’s eager to have the answers provided to him, particularly in this confrontation. He doesn’t have to think, and he doesn’t really need to stand up to his father. He can just defer to the text and shrug.

The audio doesn’t play this scene straight. It’s chopped up, phrases are slightly bent to melody, and it’s cut with more mysterious and garbled vocal samples. These parts, which often sound demonic, are crucial to the musicality and the unsettling tone. Even with a throughline of conversation, that narrative is tipped off-kilter and contrasted with seemingly unrelated commentary and phrases that are difficult to make out through the filtering. You’re mostly hearing two men who feel sure about what they’re saying, but it’s presented in a context where nothing seems solid or certain.

Buy it from Bandcamp.