A ghostly San Francisco skyline appears in the distance. Light glares through it, and the buildings feel ethereal, leaving a brief impression of a city rather than something concrete. A VHS tape synth trumpets its arrival before fading into the haunting sound of distant strings. This is Tomorrow’s Harvest, the 2013 album by Scottish duo Boards of Canada. And I can’t stop listening to it.
I’ve had the album on repeat since I entered quarantine. At over an hour long, with minimal vocals and sparse instrumentation, listening to it seems like it should be a barren experience. Instead, the music captures a fleeting and unsettling feeling, then builds another universe from that ephemerality. This trend is highlighted in “Reach For The Dead,” the second of the album’s 17 tracks, which rests on a simple pounding drum, a heartbeat that pulses intermittently throughout the song. But atop that base rhythm lies an ascending track that grabs at the heavens.
Andrew Burke, an English professor at the University of Winnipeg, wrote that “the album’s dominant themes [are] environmental collapse and the degradation and decay of the landscape,” but the record does not merely mourn the world that was. It seems to wonder at the world ours could still become. As a helicopter takes off in the opening moments of “White Cyclosa”, a looping synthesizer meshes with a melancholy set of chimes to build a mournful yet energized song. Tomorrow’s Harvest outlines a world in decay. Yet, it also seems to transcend that world and its inhabitants, drifting to possible change. Track 12, “Uritual,” feels cold in much the same way Pitchfork once described Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume ii, a piece “only accidentally contaminated by human emotion.” Despite this, the album never quite fully leaves its roots behind; the next track, “Nothing is Real,” opens with a hazy conversation, brushing an intentional touch of humanity into the opening of another chillingly rhythmic track.
This push and pull between present and future is what keeps me returning to the album; it paints a better world that is out of reach, but still tantalizingly close, just inches away through a synthesizer veil. “Transmisiones Ferox,” the seventh track, opens with a hissing, radio-like crackle and then a woman’s voice echoing the words “nineteen ninety-nine” before receding. Some lone message is trying to punch through the record’s static haze and impart a moment of humanity, but it never quite makes it. The failed attempt is reflected in the album’s final track, “Semena Mertvykh” (an anglicized version of the Russian for Seeds of the Dead), a toweringly empty song. The track groans under its weight, but it is a hollow weight — the absolute horror of a world left to dust. Boards of Canada told the Guardian that the “last track has a deliberate feeling of complete futility,” something to snatch away the “sanctuary” that the more human moments in previous tracks might provide. The album concludes with the reaping of tomorrow’s harvest, and its bounty is one of loss.
It feels perhaps unhealthy to fixate on an album that muses on “Collapse” and a “Cold Earth” in a time where so much is uncertain, and the present seems to be crumbling. Feelings of despair at the suffering we see each day have occupied much of my quarantine. This is a solitary sorrow — something that can only be fought back collectively. There is immense beauty in the current moments of uprising across the country, times where people stand up and fight back against the weight of the world, their pooled humanity bursting through the haze. I also see it in people dancing to the music of a band in the impromptu Capital Hill Autonomous Zone, comrades in resistance letting themselves sway to a tune momentarily freed of our world. Tomorrow’s Harvest is bleak, unforgiving, inhumane. And despite all of that, it has moments of hope and humanity — and as they shine through the cracks of its hollow internal world, they encourage us to reach out and create such moments together.
Image Credit: Original Photography/ Benjamin Roberts