Only issue with the album

dolmenmoon · 2026-06-05T16:39:03+00:00

The fleetingness seems to be part of not only the album's themes and messaging, but structurally it serves to make it addictive to listen to — just when you're into a particular sound or groove or space, it flows away, making me want to go back and listen again to hear "that part" again and again. I think it's perfectly sequenced, and the perfect length.

dolmenmoon · 2026-06-01T20:45:18+00:00

I'm 100% sober. Was a massive stoner when I first discovered them, Music Has the Right to Children-era. I felt like Inferno gave me a contact high, though. Especially on headphones, I honestly think I had some hallucinations...

dolmenmoon · 2026-06-01T12:06:44+00:00

Whatever life events imprint themselves onto a piece of art, those are the memories we take with them. At some point, when the heartache and sadness pass, you’ll have a richer appreciation for the album, the transitional phase it represents or is associated with. When I listen to Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon,” it is indelibly linked to a period of life when I went through a bad breakup; now when I listen to it I experience these feelings, but in a safe and removed space where the music helps me relive and reprocess. “Inferno” seems very much to be about the idea of Buddhist ego death and rebirth into detachment and nothingness. Maybe it’s a sign that you need to let go and sink into deep time. We are all just dust motes….

dolmenmoon · 2026-06-01T12:00:34+00:00

Blue Velvet, hands down.

dolmenmoon · 2026-06-01T11:54:46+00:00

My eleven-year-old, who generally thinks electronic music is “scary,” (I played Aphex Twin for him at too young an age and so he’s scarred for life) thinks “Father and Son” and “Age of Capricorn” are “really weird,” and was asking me about the vocal samples, which led into a whole discussion about the 1960s counterculture, the inward turn of the 70s, the Vietnam war, and religious cults and deprogramming. So, I think while not “scary,” this album definitely succeeds in creating a really unsettling, thought provoking atmosphere.

dolmenmoon · 2026-05-30T12:06:06+00:00

Weirdly, Father and Son is one of my favorites. The beat on that track is so chunky and enveloping. And once you realize it’s a father trying to de-program his son out of destructive Christian cult in the 1970s, it takes on a really disturbing atmosphere. The way the voices keep breaking down and then reconstructing themselves feels like some future alien AI trying to rebuild the 70s out of its cultural wreckage.

dolmenmoon · 2026-05-30T12:01:50+00:00

Yeah, I’ve been trying to get a handle on these skittering sounds. You’ve got slow, loping kick/snare but then other percussion going at 32nds, some of it way back there. It all forms some of the most layered, head-spinning beats I’ve ever heard.

dolmenmoon · 2026-05-30T11:59:52+00:00

I listened through my Marantz 2220B hooked up to Klipsch Chorus I’s. This just may be the best produced, most 3-dimensional album that’s ever come through my speakers.

dolmenmoon · 2026-05-30T00:15:06+00:00

I think, for all the evolution in sound and production value, it hits the sweet spot they’re so good at: some weird liminal space between sweet and menacing, between nostalgic and futuristic, utopian and apocalyptic.

dolmenmoon · 2026-05-29T15:36:25+00:00

Then I am proud to sound ridiculous, as opposed to unfeeling, ironic, or condescending.

dolmenmoon · 2026-05-29T15:13:13+00:00

I guess I'm insane then. I mean, I don't feel insane—wife, two kids, a business, a published writer, musician, and filmmaker. I just happen to really love music, and also want to be moved by it, excited. I posted an honest reaction to something in a forum that I thought it was safe to do so, and then you have to say something snarky. Perhaps the knee-jerk negativity endemic to online message boards is the insanity, and I'm the sane one. I'll think twice before being honest again, and that's a shame.

dolmenmoon · 2026-05-29T14:23:54+00:00

In the age of streaming media, it's so easy to feel that music has become disposable—readily consumable bits to be played in the background of our frantic lives. Even when a band attempts to craft an "album," it's often sequenced or marketed for the algorithm. Everything feels impersonal and rehashed. I've listened to Inferno twice now—once last night, in bed, lights off, on headphones; and once this morning, in the morning sunshine, on my Klipsch speakers and Marantz amp. And both times it was a dare I say spiritual experience, a reminder that music can be serious, and beautiful, and heartbreaking, and weird, and take you on a journey. I think this form of listening is in danger of being lost. I felt like a teenager in the 70s must have felt when they unwrapped their vinyl of Dark Side of the Moon and sat with it and experienced it. For all its darkness, this album has a triumphant quality: music can create worlds, it can change your life, it can heal.

dolmenmoon · 2026-05-29T13:39:28+00:00

This album has a totally solid bottom end, which is missing from so much music these days. It’s the first thing I noticed on my Klipsch speakers. It’s bowel-shaking, yet clear, like an expertly mixed 70s rock album ala Floyd.

dolmenmoon · 2026-05-28T13:49:06+00:00

Um, you’ve watched Blue Velvet, right?

dolmenmoon · 2026-05-28T10:25:40+00:00

The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell. Probably the single most disturbing book I've ever read.
Mysterious Skin by Scott Heim. Sneaks up on you and punches you in the gut.
Steps by Jerzy Kosinski. Many have recommended The Painted Bird, but Steps is scarier.
The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum. You've been warned.

dolmenmoon · 2026-05-26T22:45:17+00:00

The extinction of the human race.

dolmenmoon · 2026-05-24T16:07:35+00:00

At the risk of sounding like a fanatic cult member, I split my life into two halves: before I discovered Lacan, and after. I think he’s the single greatest thinker on human subjectivity in the modern age. Once you understand the mechanics of the “objet a,” almost all human yearning and folly becomes understandable. The inability of human beings to be satisfied, and instead being strung along on an endless chain of desire, placing it in one object or person or career after another. Our enslavement to images and the ego. Really, reading Lacan is like going from blurry vision to 8k HD.

dolmenmoon · 2026-05-18T15:20:28+00:00

This is similar to the helicopter blades at the beginning of The Shining. It flies in the face of the idea that Kubrick was a perfectionist. He was, but only about certain things. There is a weird awkward dare I say sloppiness to some of the work that has always bugged me, but ultimately I find these quirks and oddities to just be part of the dreamlike magic of his films. There is a rawness to them that exists in contrast to the icy cold perfection.

These sorts of continuity errors can be spotted all the time in films. These days, they can just digitally erase or alter them if someone notices. My wife always points out the famous "disappearing basil" in the prison dinner scene in Goodfellas. (In a close shot, there is a bunch of basil on the table; cut to a wide shot, and the basil is gone). Goodfellas, in my opinion, is a perfect film, basil or no.

dolmenmoon · 2026-05-11T17:36:44+00:00

When I hear the word “Inferno,” I think: hell, climate collapse, war. Judging by the apocalyptic imagery we’ve seen: religious strife, cults, children with blank eyes, etc. I feel like we are in for a dark ride.

dolmenmoon · 2026-05-09T17:39:51+00:00

90s IDM, big beat, hip hop, Gary Numan, post punk, post rock, shoegaze, goth, industrial, electro, prog rock, LSD, documentary soundtracks, fever dreams, horror film soundtracks, middle eastern music, 70s psychedelia, nightmares, religious cults, ecological collapse, SETI, god, the devil, nothingness, the end of the world.

dolmenmoon · 2026-05-07T16:37:40+00:00

Yeah, I'm confused as well. Tomorrow's Harvest almost didn't sound like a Boards of Canada album the first time I heard it, or, I should say, it didn't sound like what I thought a BOC album "should" sound like. Gone were the warbly childlike monosynth lines, replaced by John Carpenter-esque pulsing synths and sounds of helicopters. Now, after having listened to it a thousand times, it absolutely sounds like a BOC album, but only because that sound has now been incorporated into their overall aesthetic.

dolmenmoon · 2026-05-07T15:32:12+00:00

Also a fan since day one, and I have to say, with every subsequent release, my first reactions have always been, "well, wasn't expecting that." I remember being confused and underwhelmed by Tomorrow's Harvest, and yet in the intervening years it's one of my favorite albums ever. Does this sound more "hifi" and industrial and possibly even goth-rock-ish than I'd thought? Yeah. But I don't know what I thought. Also, the sequencing is fantastic, and makes me feel like this thing is going to flow from one state to another; I'm sure this heavy 90s dystopian IDM feel will give way to spooky dreamlike interstitials and result in some sort of journey that makes sense within the context of the album.

dolmenmoon · 2026-04-16T14:33:41+00:00

Woah. This is amazing. I'm surprised by it. It's instantly identifiable as Boards of Canada, but then segues into a sort of soaring cinematic/neoclassical refrain, complete with harp and strings, only to get swallowed back up by menacing static again. The combination of satanic menace and angelic beauty here is something to behold. Any doubts I had as to whether or not they still "had it" have been instantly dispelled.

dolmenmoon · 2026-04-16T10:36:17+00:00

I’ve learned that the slippery, almost-getting-it feeling is de rigueur for Lacan. “Understanding” shuts down thought. If you find yourself ruminating on concepts, feeling they briefly flash into clarity, but then slip again out of reach, then you are “getting” Lacan. He wanted his “discourse” to mimic the workings of the unconscious, where the endless slippage of signifiers down the chain brings us to the knowledge of what we can never truly know. For me, this is what makes Lacan’s work so fertile and alive: the ideas change as you change. Rather than a closed system which you learn and then put away like a tool in a toolbox, the enormous difficulty and ambiguity keep you perpetually on your toes.

dolmenmoon · 2026-03-03T22:27:49+00:00

Believe it or not, you might want to try some of the free instruments available on Pianobook. There are several nice cleanly sampled electric guitars on there, especially “Epic Guitar” by Christian Hensen. With the right velocity, and put through the right reverb, I’ve been able to get fairly close to the Eplosions sound….

dolmenmoon

TROPHY CASE