The Inferno Reading List

[Redd Panderson]

Creating this thread for folks to share good reads that are related to Boards of Canada's album Inferno.

I'd been waffling on starting Dante's Divine Comedy for over a year; when BOC announced Inferno, I knew it was time! I started it in mid May and am now partway into Purgatorio. Glad to say I finished Inferno before Inferno dropped!

My next-ups, plus one recent read:

-The End Of Time by Julian Barbour, where he discusses his Platonia concept which is referenced in track 18 of Inferno.
-Illiad and Odyssey (finally, should've read these years and years ago), because I did not expect it to be so heavily referenced in The Divine Comedy.
-Kurt Schwitters Merz Art by Isabel Schulz, about the early 20th century dadaist-adjacent artist Kurt Schwitters. I actually already read this in March before any new BOC was announced. The BOC connection might seem dubious at first, but Schwitters' practice of using decay and trash to make collage art and his sound poetry with phonemes on the edge of legibility actually have some parallels with BOC's process of breathing new life into decay and working with vaguely familiar yet uncanny material.