.png)
Boards of Canada's Inferno as an Adaptation of Dante
The latest Boards of Canada record, Inferno, made a pretty big splash on its release earlier this year. The album made the rounds beyond Boards of Canada's own cult following, getting rave reviews from sites like Clash (9/10), Pitchfork (8.6/10), and Uncut (9/10). The album also fared well on review aggregators like Album of the Year and RateYourMusic.
Even more recently, Sam Shepard of Floating Points teamed up with the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra for the classical/electronic fusion Mere Mortals. Unfortunately I can't say that Mere Mortals reached anywhere near the hype of Inferno even when in my opinion it can be just as impactful and effective.
What the two albums do share, however, (besides coming from two of the best electronic music projects of the 21st century) is a similar conceptual basis: that of myths and epic poetry. Inferno, if the name wasn't a give away, is loosely inspired by the famous first cantica of Dante's Divine Comedy. And Mere Mortals is a dramatic concept album that reimagines the Greek myth of Pandora for modern concerns.
Despite both albums being almost primarily (or entirely) instrumental, they each capture the dramatic arcs of the stories they are adapting. First I will look at Inferno, which despite taking very loosely from Dante, it isn't too hard to read into the atmosphere and themes of the album and come away with something Dantean. Later this week I will talk about how Floating Points adapts Pandora's story into climactic orchestral-meets-electro fusion.
Dante
Before I get to the album, a very quick overview of Dante's Inferno is probably in order. Dante wrote the first part of his epic narrative poem roughly between 1306 and 1312, just a few years after he was exiled from his native Florence in 1302 for aligning with the Black Guelphs and the Holy Roman Emperor rather than the White Guelphs and the Pope. Dante wrote in Tuscan rather than Latin, and partially due to the success of his Commedia, Tuscan would become the basis for common Italian many centuries later.
The Inferno starts with Dante circa 1300 exiting from a dark wood onto the steps of an enormous mountain (Purgatory) where he is accosted by three large beasts who represent the three groupings of sin (violence, fraud, and incontinence). Before Dante can be dismembered he is guided by the spirit of the Roman poet Virgil (Dante's primary literary influence), who was sent to Dante by the angelic Beatrice whom Dante had loved in life before her early death at the age of 24 in 1290. Virgil relates to Dante that he must first travel through Hell to witness and understand the depravity of sin then climb Purgatory to cleanse himself of his own sin before he can reach Beatrice and Heaven.
In Canto III Dante and Virgil come to the gates of Hell and are brought across the river Acheron by Charon the ferryman of souls, one of many references and allusions Dante makes to classical mythology. From here the poets travel through the 9 circles of Hell speaking with tortured shades as they go along, learning about their lives and the nature of their sins. In the early circles, these shades are largely repentant and achieve Dante's pity, but later on his pity dries up as the shades' sins become more and more grave (especially as they become of the kind that compel others towards sin). Some of the shades Dante speaks to ask him to tell their story, to keep their names alive once he returns to the land of the living.
Once Dante reaches the bottom of the 9th circle where Satan is frozen in a massive lake of ice, he and Virgil are able to climb through to the opposite side and begin their trek back to Purgatory.
Dante wrote the Inferno and the rest of his Commedia for multiple purposes. A primary goal was to serve as a kind of whistle-blowing accusation against many past and present (as of his time) members of the Catholic church. Like Martin Luther would a few centuries later, Dante wished to expose the hypocritical greed and fraud of many Popes, Archbishops, and others who protected and defended the policies which funneled wealth from the people towards the Church. This is why Dante wrote in Tuscan, he chose the language of the people so that they could learn and be set right by his work.
However, Dante also wrote this poem for a more personal motivation. Dante used the Commedia as a way of recognizing and working towards repentance for what he saw as his own sins. The dark woods that Dante emerges from in Canto I represent (among other things) the dire crossroads he had been put in after the Pope betrayed him and his fellow Florentine White Guelphs. Pope Boniface VIII invited French soldiers to occupy the city in a coup for the Black Guelphs while the Florentine White Guelph delegation was en-route for a diplomatic invitation to the Vatican. By some metric, Dante viewed his gullibility as a symptom of his lack of diligence in condemning those who defraud and abuse their positions of power and authority as Boniface VIII had. Throughout much of the Inferno, Virgil encourages Dante to harden his heart against such conmen, thieves, and those that betray others. Is it surprising that this story still feels relevant and applicable today?
Boards of Canada
Boards of Canada's Inferno begins with two mysterious-sounding tracks which relate to the idea of beginning and creation, and they tie a connective thread between science and God. Track 1 is very short and mostly serves as moody vibes, but its title "Introit" isn't difficult to decode. The 2nd track "Prophecy at 1420 MHz" carries on this idea of being the first in a sequence. 1420 MHz is the frequency emitted when a Hydrogen atom undergoes a specific transition (Hydrogen being the first element), and the lyrics of the track make a comparison between God and modern science (both being attempts at explaining the origins of our universe).
Track 3 is where the connection to Dante really starts to emerge, it's title ("Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan") comes out to H-He-Li when you look at the abbreviations for the 3 elements, which is very nearly HHeLL. Canto III of Dante's Inferno is also where Dante (the narrative character) and his guide Virgil come upon the gates of Hell, inscribed with the famous "Abandon all hope ye who enter here". Dante (the poet) also gives a lot of credence to the importance of the number 3 in numerology (derived from the Holy Trinity). He wrote 3 cantica's each with 33 cantos and each canto was made of groupings of 3 lines in ABA rhyme. With Boards of Canada we have track 3, with 3 elements, tying directly into what happens in Canto III. Further references to this "rule of 3s" can be found in the track "Acts of Magic" which refers to the 3 Acts of the Apostles. "Acts of Magic" may also refer to the Acts of Pilate, or the Descent of Christ into Hell.
Track 3 also points to Dante's cosmology as well as his numerology. The track references the biblical Leviathan in its title, listing it directly after the first 3 elements of our periodic table, emphasizing that the devil is something as inherent to our world as the building block elements. In Dante's Inferno, Satan (himself a Leviathan-like figure) exists trapped in a lake of ice at the center of Earth, the deepest pit of Hell, and the point where gravity converges.
The following track, "Age of Capricorn" continues the imagery of the devil and the antichrist. First, we have the title, which refers to the image of a Capricorn: half-goat and half-fish. Second are the lyrics, which make reference to the astrologer Nostradamus, whose predictions of the future have been interpreted as referring to the coming of an antichrist. This also reads as the second reference to a prophecy after Track 2's title. Similarly, Virgil and various shades tell Dante multiple prophecies of what will befall him in Florence in 1302, orchestrated by someone that Dante views as a heretical and villainous figure.
From here the album's references to religious cults ("Father and Son"), the Dharmic region of hell where sinners are punished ("Naraka"), and the connection between the Word of God and the physical manifestation of God ("The Word Becomes Flesh") are thematically related but not as easily mapped to Dante.
Looking at the record as one complete package: the broad arc of the album starts largely enigmatic and mysterious in the first 6 tracks, before becoming much darker and more imposing in its middle, and finally reaching a brighter more hopeful sound starting with track 15 "Arena Americanada". Boards of Canada even use the beeps of a heart monitor in the latter half of the album to bring to mind the idea of rebirth to cap it all off. This grants the album a very cinematic and dramatic progression, not dissimilar from Dante's own journey from the dark, mysterious woods where he emerged in Canto I, to the deepest most disturbing reaches of Hell he traveled through, all the way to his emergence on the opposite side of the 9th circle in Canto XXXIV, ready to make the journey to Purgatory and eventually Heaven.
If it isn't clear, I have a lot of passion for both this album and Dante's poetry. I flattened the discussion of the album specifically to talk about just one facet, but don't let that imply that it is wholly defined by its connection to Dante. Inferno is a terrific album which seems to only get richer and more interesting the more I listen to it. There's an enormous amount of variety and experimentation on these tracks, with laid-back groovy tracks like "Into the Magic Land" contrasting glitchier and more obviously chopped-and-screwed stuff like "Father and Son".
As for Dante's Inferno, I highly recommend reading it if you haven't already. John Ciardi's translation captures the accessibility that Dante intended when he wrote his original in Tuscan rather than Latin, while also managing to maintain the rhyme scheme-- no easy feat in translation. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's far older 1867 English translation is the only other which I have read, and while its word-to-word translation is closer to Dante's original and more poetically beautiful than Ciardi's, it was also much harder to decipher in my experience.
Check back to wxou.org later this week for my review and analysis of Floating Points' Mere Mortals.
Paul Taylor - Web Content Director
Comments