Collapse (Tomorrow's Harvest)

Boards of Canada (the official moniker of fraternal production duo Michael Sandison and Marcus Eion) were, as they announced upfront on their sophomore album Geogaddi, by way of a repeated sample in the piece titled "Music Is Math", primarily preoccupied with examining the hazy nostalgia of "the past inside the present". All the same, their switch to dystopian futures in 2013's Tomorrow's Harvest (now in double digits and, sadly, still their most recent album to date) did not come completely out of nowhere. Their earliest albums contained elements of looking forward, not merely backwards, expressing explicitly potent concerns about the possible coming times we might be building. Music Has The Right To Children had "One Very Important Thought", which alluded to a hypothetical Orwellian society in which books and TV shows are subject to so-called obscenity trials; its sober warnings ("If you can be told what you can see and read, then it follows that you can be told what to say and think") are counterbalanced by the track's warm tones and by its final call to empowerment. "Energy Warning", off of Geogaddi, is a markedly more sombre piece, based around a sample from a 1979 4-H PSA, in which a child delivers a haunting message to the current adult generation of the world their wastefulness may be procuring for himself and, more implicitly, his own children ("There may not be enough energy to go around by the time I'm a parent"). The vocal seems eerily faded, the relic of some neglected good intention, a call to an action not heeded that has travelled an awfully long way to remind the generation that's since acquired the Earth that their continued plundering of its finite resources is a problem they've also inherited, and remain no closer to solving.

Resources, and our misuse thereof, are a prevalent concern of Tomorrow's Harvest (judging by its title, and those of several of its tracks), an album that I'm inclined to view in its entirety as a thematic sequel to the 35-second "Energy Warning". Its own tone was suggested less by PSAs than by the soundtracks of the dystopian science fiction flicks of yesteryear. To that end, it seems wrapped up in its own deceptive nostalgia - one of the more tongue-in-cheek moments occurs at the very beginning, with the inclusion of a faux ident that appears to place the implied internal narrative within the context of having tuned in for a late night TV low-budgeter. As a safety net it does not endure - "Semena Mertvykh", the album closer, offers no return to this suggested framing device, embracing its dystopian ambience to its fullest and forsaking us with an eerily desolate send-off. The most ominous track, however, is arguably the one that falls square in the middle of Tomorrow's Harvest - track no. 9, "Collapse", which goes out on a point of menacing abruptness. The last twelve seconds or so are focussed on an accelerating whooshing sound, giving the impression of something falling from high up in the sky, although the moment of impact is denied us. The ending of "Collapse" is, in some regards, the set-up to a joke, but the nature of that joke varies depending on what listening format you're using. On CD or digital, "Collapse" leads directly into "Palace Posy" which, while not exactly a benign listen (the title is an anagram of "apocalypse", for eff's sake), provides a discordantly vibrant contrast. On vinyl, "Collapse" is the final track on Side B, meaning that there is no direct follow-up; by the time you've loaded up Side C and have "Palace Posy" playing, that dead, empty silence in which something catastrophic feels like it must have occurred has had plenty of time in which to fester. What exactly is meant to be falling in that track? A nuclear device? Some kind of divine judgement? Or is the fall a symbolic one, to indicate the long overdue upending of a cursed civilisation?

Whatever the specifics, "Collapse" implicates the decisive point where things were pushed a notch too far out of balance, and something had to give. The moment of impact is ostensibly a missing piece of the puzzle, yet one gets the feeling that the build-up and the fall-out contain a succession of equally gut-wrenching impacts all of their own. In a Guardian interview from around the album's release, Sandison elucidated that, "There's a palindromic structure centred around the track Collapse in the middle," confirming that it is to be perceived it as the thematic nexus of the album. Some listeners have interpreted this to mean that the tracklisting is literally out of order (and that "Semena Mertvykh" should follow on from "Gemini", "Come To Dust" from "Reach For The Dead", etc), with "Collapse" serving as the true finale, but I'm not so hot on that theory myself (for one, it's not exactly how a palindrome works, is it?). My view leans more toward the centrality of "Collapse" emphasising its dominance, and its inescapability - whichever way you go, you're always going to end up back where you started, and you have no means of avoiding that unspeakable catastrophe that looms in between. It should be noted that "Collapse" is itself a palindrome - the track's musical content sounds the same when played in reverse. There is a sense of futility, of being unable to reverse the trajectory on which we've found ourselves. By "Collapse", we're aware that we've reached the point of no return, but how far back did was our grim fate truly sealed? The palindromic structure, along with the album title, suggests that each track leading up to "Collapse" should be perceived as its own individual seed, with each corresponding track thereafter representing the crop of that which was previously sown. By the time we've reached "Semena Mertvykh", there is the sinking sensation that our resources might already have depleted. As with "Energy Warning", the underlying narrative is of an earlier generation leaving its successors with a future that is not sustainable; the title of that distressingly sterile final track, translating from Russian to "Seeds of The Dead", would appear to confirm that the legacy of this bygone generation was not worth much in the end, counteracting the regenerative prospects evoked in the track title of "New Seeds". The palindrome format emphasises how what happens in one temporal state has reverberations in the other, be it the anticipation of the "after" or the consequences of the "before". In a particularly delicious trick, this extending across the temporal gap is openly advertised in the title of the second track, "Reach For The Dead", which anticipates the bleak decay setting in by the penultimate track, "Come To Dust", whose own title seems to beckon in response (it's also a double entendre, evoking reproductive sterility and mirroring the "Seeds of The Dead" title directly below it).

Given the album's clear affection for the visions of old-school science-fictions, we might view the overall effect as forming the sonic equivalent to the conclusion of the original Planet of The Apes (1968). Ignoring the existence of the sequels, the story ends with Taylor (Charlton Heston) and Nova (Linda Harrison) escaping the apes and riding off along the shoreline, a man and a woman who, in a more optimistic picture, could well become the next Adam and Eve in heralding the dawn of a new human civilisation. Yet the final image with which the film leaves us is infamously not one of hope, but of ruination. Dr Zaius (Maurice Evans) has already warned us that Taylor will meet "his destiny" out there. What he in fact discovers is the destiny of all humankind, embodied in the wrecked remains of the Statue of Liberty. The sunken statue is literally blocking the route where Taylor and Nova were headed, giving us a closing arrangement in which the mistakes of the past loom heavy and deny a way forward for the future - and when Taylor gives his infamous "Damn you all to Hell!" tirade, he is in effect condemning the film's viewership in the present day, for their (impending) failure to prevent the course of human history from heading down its catastrophic trajectory. The past, present and future are bound up within a common destiny, the inevitability of our collapse being a collective nightmare that haunts us all.

Well, they did warn us. That kid from the 4-H warned us.