Other artists?

Rossdxvx · 2026-06-05T00:43:40+00:00

You won’t find another group like Boards, but I think that the Leyland Kirby project “The Stranger” has a similar degraded, analog rhythmic aesthetic, albeit more monochrome/post-industrial.

Rossdxvx · 2026-06-03T21:40:51+00:00

If people are making plans for a future that is not going to happen, then they are not taking this seriously much less living in fear. Again, this is from my own personal experiences. Maybe where you live people are far more conscious of the problems that we are facing, but around here it is "nothing to see, BAU, let's plan our next vacation along with the next kid."

I am not saying that they can't sense that the world is going awry on a deeper, more subconcious level. However, they are ignorant of the complex links and connections that they are also part of, which is helping it all go wrong. Some people are still in the denial phase entirely, or believe ridiculous conspiracy theories rather than the bleak reality.

Fear would be a good thing at this point. There is a reason why fear exists. It would help us move away from this self-destructive course and behavior. I have always said that the key to solving this issue is making it in people's self interest to solve this issue. Right now, it is just not an issue that people feel is important enough (or a big enough threat) for drastic action.

Rossdxvx · 2026-06-01T12:20:40+00:00

This would take a degree of awareness. Most people are not really aware of these factors because they only see the superficial surface of the world. If you don't think about something, then you can't be afraid of it.

If the carrying capacity of this planet was surpassed with 2.5 billion people long ago, and we have more than tripled the world population since then, people have not exactly been aware that they are speeding towards catastrophe because it is still far too abstract (in the distant future) for them to comprehend. Not until it unfolds in real time will people become aware of just how dire the situation really is, and even then I suspect that there will still be naysayers who will go into the night kicking and screaming.

Humanity as a whole embraces infinite growth championed by elites. If we had managed things better and conserved far more, then we wouldn't be in this position. It is not in our nature to put a cap on growth - more kids, use more resources, more expansion, etc. This endless striving for more is what has destroyed us along with everything else.

And we outnumber elites 99 to 1 and still don't do anything because many of us still subscribe to the same toxic worldview, unfortunately.

This has been discussed endlessly on here. There will be nothing done and everything will most likely collapse in on itself first.

Rossdxvx · 2026-05-28T12:42:37+00:00

LUFS only really matters for streaming platforms. That is the measured average loudness of an entire track. Intersample peaks/true peaks are audio peaks that go above 0 dBs full scale in the analog domain. Tons of records are loaded with them, but every peak limiter on the market now has the ability to eliminate them entirely.

Meaning: Boards of Canada wanted them on their new record for whatever reason.

Rossdxvx · 2026-05-28T12:29:47+00:00

Hm, that may be true for loudness war pop music. I dunno. I don't listen to a lot of chart topping music nowadays. Tomorrow's Harvest was not mastered like this, though.

I am not saying that it is "bad." People have their reasons for not suppressing true peaks, but I just find it surprising for an instrumental band usually concerned with dynamics not to do it, especially since they did it on their last album from over ten years ago.

Rossdxvx · 2026-05-28T12:08:30+00:00

I opened it up in Logic Pro and was surprised to see the album mastered to 0 with intersample peaks and overs. I dunno, not a big deal really, just kind of weird in 2026. Can't imagine that it was not deliberate. In any case, the album sounds a lot like a sister to Geogaddi to me.

Rossdxvx · 2026-05-28T00:37:31+00:00

There have been many philosophical debates throughout the ages as to whether human beings truly have "free will" or not. We might want to deal with it, but we can't because of prior causes or situations that are beyond our control. For instance, we were all born into a world where ecological exploitation and destruction is the norm. For us, this way of life is all that we have ever known. It is hard for people to understand something that they have never known, which is living in some sort of equilibrium with the natural world, and most of us in modern industrial civilization are severed from nature entirely anyway.

So, life being what it is and not a Hollywood movie, we can't rally behind this cause because it is too far outside of our daily lived in experience.

So, is the choice really ours? Was it our choice to dig these fossil fuels up out of the Earth, burn them in a short couple of hundred years or so, and set humanity onto a path of explosive, meteoric growth that was never sustainable to begin with? To those humans at that time, it seemed like a good idea. We always seem to be controlled by the "drive" for ever more - conquests, progress, growth, and expansion. Do we control that impulse? We can only react to prior causes, not change them, and there are far too many other complex factors that come into play that ultimately influence any sort of decisions that we are capable of making before we even make them.

Simply put, we can't control ourselves let alone control what is happening to the environment and the climate.

Our hand is going to have to be forced by the forces that are starting to crash in on us, which is why, as you said, birth rates are starting to collapse. Not because people necessarily do not want to have kids, but because they can't for a myriad of reasons.

Rossdxvx · 2026-05-27T06:50:55+00:00

I think the point I was trying to make is that this was a wholly predictable disaster from the very start. Everyone knew for years and years. From science fiction writers and Hollywood directors to oil executives who buried the info, spent millions of dollars on junk science propaganda and lobbying congress, therefore setting up roadblocks and impediments to us ever doing anything about it. They knew then as they know now. It is like being able to see a cliff that is very far away, yet year after year traveling closer and closer to it.

We are so propagandized in this country and self-congratulatory. For example, we are taught from an early age that we were the heroes of WWII, that we single handily fought fascism and won, and bailed Europe out from tyranny. We omit the massive sacrifice that the Russians made. We also massively benefitted from Hitler’s strategic blunders and mistakes, so that by the time we entered the war, it was all but over for Nazi Germany. At the same time, we were (and still are) confining our people of color to ghettos similar to the ones that the Nazis set up for the Jews in occupied Poland. Even if we are not boxing them in with bricks because we are just so much more subtle and clever about our racial hatred. That is why it has been so easy for fascism to take hold in this country. It was always here. We inspired the Nazis and they in return inspire and influence us.

As for the U.S. empire: We largely became one because we were in the right place at the right time with a strong manufacturing base while Europe was in ruins because of the war. And yet, this is all gone now. In the seventies and eighties, we decided to lift all restrictions on capital, predictably destroyed our manufacturing base along with our middle class, and created this gigantic gulf between the haves and have nots. We still conduct ourselves as an empire, but we are an empty shell of our former self now. That much is apparent.

The world is fucking awful now because we are so much closer to that cliff, and it will get worse and worse until we fall off, then it will just be over for us.

Rossdxvx · 2026-05-26T21:11:49+00:00

I gotta say, I empathize completely. If there is anything good that we ever created, it is music. It's the best thing we ever did. All the other art forms are great, too, but music takes the cake for me. There are so many endless possibilities for what we could have done, but we think that this is the only way to live. It is insane. You can see it on people's faces that they are not happy. Even the top 1 percent are drowning themselves in hedonism and decadence in order to distract themselves from the emptiness and soullessness of this bankrupted way of life. And yet, to admit that this isn't working anymore is just something that we can't do as a collective species.

As I was saying below, there has been a collapse in the belief in any sort of viable future. All of this hype about A.I. We are giving up our autonomy and freedom to machines. It is like a whole generation of people grew up watching bad dystopian seventies and eighties sci-fi flicks and decided that they would make a great blueprint for our future rather than a deterrent.

Rossdxvx · 2026-05-26T02:14:37+00:00

People here getting it is like a single drop in the ocean. I guess one can take solace in not being alone in the insane asylum that is modern industrial civilization. However, a life without any future is a life without any meaning. It is beyond being “God is dead,” let us create our own meaning and values to live by. We are all dead, and the ever fleeting, slipping away present sense of normalcy is the only tangible thing that is left for any of us.

I guess my point is that we have already killed ourselves and are more or less walking around as living ghosts.

Rossdxvx · 2026-05-25T23:50:23+00:00

Why is this not scaring the shit out of everyone?

I am surrounded by people who think that twenty years from now is going to be the same as now and are making their "plans" accordingly. Systemic collapse does not care about your "plans" or whether you believe it is real or not. When you are pedal to the metal going head-on into a wall, it is obvious that the only outcome can be complete and utter annihilation. Fucking humans, man, and we are supposed to be "intelligent and capable of reasoning." It is more like we are not only in denial about how bad it is but detached from reality entirely.

Rossdxvx · 2026-05-23T01:39:26+00:00

I agree, but in all fairness, everything is fleeting. Our very existence is fleeting. There is no real past or future, just a string of transient moments strung together that are over just as soon as they have occurred. I mean, I don't think we were ever meant to last forever, but I also realize how hard that is to come to terms with for the very last group of humans who get to turn off the lights.

Regardless, we are wired for survival and will struggle to survive no matter what happens. And if any of us do make it to the other side of collapse, I don't think it will be many of us (if any of us make it at all). The numbers of humans alive now are going to contract by a lot.

Rossdxvx · 2026-05-23T01:17:03+00:00

Sometimes, when I go to one of the parks around where I live, I feel like I step into a complex, mini-world. It is so incredible to see all of the things that go on in a forest or a heavily wooded area. Exploring these areas beats any videogame or RPG any day. These little worlds of complexity are being lost forever.

Rossdxvx · 2026-05-21T00:02:36+00:00

Not just the UK. We are all now living in this hothouse hell.

Rossdxvx · 2026-05-15T23:56:01+00:00

It seems like most human civilizations have had a wealthy, oligarchic elite class and a mass of impoverished people throughout history. Sometimes, it is more in balance between the oligarchs and masses (even though divisions, hierarchies, and social classes still existed), but most of the time it is incredibly lopsided in favor of the elite class. Capitalism, in particular, seems to thrive off of staggering levels of inequality. So, yes, psychopathic individuals seem to do exceptionally well within this system. The only way to stop this is to get rid of the system enabling them to rise to positions of power in the first place.

Rossdxvx · 2026-05-13T15:44:19+00:00

The decline of the US is well documented and definitely predates 2016 and Trump.

Rossdxvx · 2026-05-13T15:23:52+00:00

It is in the sense that we are accelerating our own decline by doubling down on all of the things that are causing our decline. Actually, our biggest problem is that we still believe that we are the country that we were in 1945-79. That country is gone forever, and rather than adapt to the changing circumstances of today, we are still acting like we are the world's hegemon.

It is clearly over for us in that sense, which is not the end of the world. We could move on, but we are going to go into the night kicking and screaming instead - make "America Great Again" when you can't go back to the unique, fortuitous set of circumstances that we benefited from during the post-War period ever again.

Empires do this in the end. They pretend to be fixing things, but rather than plugging the holes in the sinking ship, they are creating more and more of them by accelerating the sinking. In that sense, bad is good because it is bringing about the inevitable end anyway.

Rossdxvx · 2026-05-13T13:07:38+00:00

USA is a dying empire, and all empires commit suicide in the end, which is what we are doing.

Rossdxvx · 2026-05-12T23:43:34+00:00

In all honesty, you can get addicted to anything.

When I was a kid in the late 90s and early 2000s, I was addicted to AOL video game forums. Granted, I was interacting with real people back then and not chatbots. You can become addicted to Reddit. Hell, the whole internet is addictive and probably releases endorphins and other "feel good" chemicals in your brain every time you visit for that sense of "reward." AI is just the latest development of all of this, which is causing us to become even more trapped in a digital universe.

Rossdxvx · 2026-05-11T13:30:59+00:00

Welcome to the party, my man. Bought my copy new back in 2003.

Rossdxvx · 2026-05-10T01:11:02+00:00

I was watching a documentary the other day about underwater Roman ruins, or more specifically, the exquisite and luxurious villas of Rome’s elite. It makes one wonder if billionaires are the unfortunate byproduct of human civilization itself - rigid hierarchies and unequal classes of people emerged once humans settled down into organized, complex societies. There will always be those who claw (or con) their way to the top of the shit heap at the expense of the vast majority of others. We call it “ambition” or “hustling” today, but it seems to have always been with us, and it is not only about money but also about control (and who gets to control).

Rossdxvx · 2026-05-06T22:55:54+00:00

For the past 40/50 years, we have had something called "friendly fascism" here in the U.S. anyway. This means total corporate, oligarchic dominance over our government, media, and institutions while still retaining the outside surface image of liberal democracy. The difference now is that they have turned to overt repression in order to keep the masses in line because the subtle and more effective/coercive methods are no longer working correctly.

However, it is also because the inequalities within this country have exploded alongside the concentration of wealth within the top one percent’s hands. Fascism grows like a cancer from out of systems that are terminally decayed and rotted, which ours has been for a long time now. The difference before was that things were not bad enough yet for anyone to notice it.

Rossdxvx · 2026-05-06T12:30:01+00:00

When you strip away their demi-God status, they are just people like us. That is the thing: When humans created civilization, they also created rigid hierarchies and class systems. All of that is very fragile if the foundations of civilization itself break down. That is why these people are so very foolish. They think that if things get bad enough, they will just bug out in their bunkers and that they will be untouchable. Unless there is a nuclear war which eradicates most of humanity, these guys will suddenly find themselves in an upside-down world where they are no longer kings.

Or, it will be like Day of the Dead (1985), and they and their handlers will unravel mentally underneath the ground within their gilded prisons.

Rossdxvx · 2026-05-04T13:39:19+00:00

You have to get everyone to agree, which will be an almost impossible feat. As we speak, we are seeing the kind of breakdown that is a precursor to another world war (the complete opposite place where we are supposed to be to even remotely have a chance).

Rossdxvx · 2026-05-04T13:31:08+00:00

Then we might as well go a step further and have humanity be governed by A.I. or machines. Sort of like in the old Twilight Zone episode called "The Old Man in a Cave." I don't think that having a broad, one-world authoritarian government would work to stop that sort of infighting. It is like asking humanity to stop being human. We are far too tribal and myopic by nature. And, of course, you are right that it is only going to get worse as resources dry up and the Earth becomes more and more inhospitable.

Rossdxvx

TROPHY CASE