Music / Tomorrow's Harvest

"Jesus was it you indeed...To flirt unkindly with my greed?"

"A lot of this LP does feel like driving by tumbleweeds, rocks, sand and coyote corpses."

—Anthony Fantano, theneedledrop

Tomorrow's Harvest is the fourth major album by Scottish electronic duo Boards of Canada released on June 5th, 2013, following a lengthy Alternate Reality Game. With a unique sound inspired by film soundtracks of the 70s and 80s, it (along with Geogaddi) demonstrates a more menacing tone than their previous albums. Apart from a few remixes released in 2016 and 2017, and a 2-hour mixtape in 2019, it has been the last original, full-length LP from the brothers.

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Tracklist:

1. "Gemini" (2:56)
2. "Reach for the Dead" (4:47)
3. "White Cyclosa" (3:13)
4. "Jacquard Causeway" (6:35)
5. "Telepath" (1:32)
6. "Cold Earth" (3:42)
7. "Transmisiones Ferox" (2:18)
8. "Sick Times" (4:16)
9. "Collapse" (2:49
10. "Palace Posy" (4:05)
11. "Split Your Infinities" (4:28)
12. "Uritual" (1:59)
13. "Nothing Is Real" (3:52)
14. "Sundown" (2:16)
15. "New Seeds" (5:39)
16. "Come to Dust" (4:07)
17. "Semena Mertvykh" (3:30)

Personnel:

• Marcus Eoin
• Michael Sandison

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Reach for the Tropes:

• After the End: Tomorrow's Harvest is (probably) about this and the events directly preceding it.
• Alternate Reality Game: There was a mysterious trail of clues leading up to the announcement of the album.
• California: The cover is a ghostly image of the San Francisco skyline; the "Reach For The Dead" video was filmed in the deserts in the more southern/eastern parts of the state, possibly around the Yermo/Barstow area. The Scotland-based BoC has not touched on why they suddenly became so interested in the Golden State, but it probably has something to do with their collaboration with Neil Krug, a Los Angeles-based photographer.
• Call-Back:
  • The title "Gemini," may be this to the song "Aquarius" from their first studio album, as both are Zodiac signs.
  • "Telepath" isn't the first song which has carried the 'Numbers Station' motif.
• Conspiracy Theorist: "Split Your Infinities" has an extensive sample of a woman describing a "FEMA Concentration Camp" outside Indianapolis.
• Death from Above: The wind noise in "Collapse" (and the abrupt ending) evokes images of a falling bomb.
• Downer Ending: "Semena Mertvykh" - Russian for "Seeds of Dead Ones" - rather cruelly reverses the optimism of the earlier song title "New Seeds."
• Epic Rocking: "Jacquard Causeway", the only song on this album to qualify.
• Fun with Acronyms: This page, which is speculated to have been an unused part of the "Tomorrow's Harvest" ARG, features the tagline "Frontline Net Observation Research & Development," which can be abbreviated as fnord.
• Foreign Language Title: "Transmisiones Ferox" ("Ferox" being Latin for "fierce," and "Tranmisiones" being Spanish for, well, "transmissions") and "Semena Mertvykh," as well as "Cosecha Transmisiones" from the promotional materials. It's worth mentioning that no previous BoC track did this (except for nouns understood to be proper).
• Homage: While not an explicit homage, "White Cyclosa" is highly reminiscent of John Harrison's score for Day of the Dead. The added helicopter sounds lend credence to this idea, however.
• Musical Squares: While the cover may not be split into squares, the pictures◊ inside◊ certainly◊ are.◊
• New Sound Album: Tomorrow's Harvest tones down the band's trademark warbly synths for a much colder, darker palette akin to the soundtrack work of John Carpenter, John Harrison and Vangelis.
• Numbers Stations: The "Cosecha Transmisiones" from the promotional campaigns consisted of a series of numbers read off in this style (the accompanying jingle is actually the end of "New Seeds").
  • As for the actual album, the song "Telepath" is meant to sound like one of these.
• One-Word Title: "Gemini," "Telepath," "Collapse," "Uritual" and "Sundown."
• Pastiche: Much of Tomorrow's Harvest is an homage to 1970s electronic horror film scores such as those by John Carpenter, Goblin, Wendy Carlos, and Fabio Frizzi.
• Pun-Based Title: "Split Your Infinities" (split infinitives).
• Sampling: A given, obviously, but possibly the most creative usage is the chanting at the end of "Palace Posy"... which is actually a jingle from a 70s Minneapolis television station.
• Shout-Out:
  • The album's title is often suspected to be a reference to Deadly Harvest, an obscure 1977 Canadian film starring a young Kim Cattrall about a catastrophic climate change that results in widespread crop failures across North America. This is seemingly reflected further by many of the song titles on the album, such as "Cold Earth," "Sick Times" and "New Seeds." According to the brothers in this interview, however, it was indeed just a coincidence, though they did note there were some similarities.
  • "Transmisiones Ferox" is a possible reference to Cannibal Ferox.
  • The title of "Come to Dust" comes from a line in a funeral song in Cymbeline.
  • "New Seeds" might be referring to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a vault located in Svalbard responsible for keeping millions of duplicates of seeds for every single crop in case things turn bad.
• Significant Anagram: The title "Palace Posy" is an anagram of "Apocalypse," which seems to be the theme for this album.
• Significant Monogram: "Jacquard Causeway," can be abbreviated as "JC." Wonder what else can be abbreviated as "JC"?
• Surreal Music Video: "Reach For The Dead" is the second BoC track to get an official music video (after "Dayvan Cowboy" from the previous album), and the first pieced together with original footage. It's a series of shots of abandoned locations in the desert; inside buildings, outside buildings, and down unpaved roads.
• Tone Shift:
  • "Nothing is Real" sounds like some kind of elevator music from a department store. It's pretty different from the rest of the album.
  • "Gemini" (and therefore, the album) begins with a faux introductory fanfare totally separate from the frantic, foreboding tones of the rest of the track.

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