Boards of Canada, the reclusive Scottish electronica duo, issued a statement yesterday expressing frustration toward the White House for using a track off their new album, Inferno, without permission. “Deep Time” is a creepy-crawly instrumental that sounds exactly how I imagine an alien abduction must feel like—which, in fairness, the White House is obsessed with. In a video posted to the White House’s Instagram account on Thursday, “Deep Time” serves as the backing track for a found-footage-style montage of grainy, distorted clips of helicopters, American flags, the Presidential seal, troops in a ship, and what appears to be an ICE detention center. The video, which was captioned with a shifty-eyes emoji, drew immediate furor from Boards of Canada’s fanbase, who tagged the group relentlessly in the comments in an effort to draw their attention to what they hoped was copyright infringement.
Following the deluge, Boards of Canada and its record label, Warp Records, commented on the incident, noting that neither party “condone[s] the unauthorised use of their music for political messaging.” It remains unclear who in Trump’s cabinet harbors an awareness of Boards of Canada, an avant-garde group whose main audience seems far away from conservatives collecting social security. One can only assume there’s a nefarious social media intern with a refined electronica palate lurking in the shadows.
Trump, ever the rule-breaker, has incited the ire of dozens of musicians over his recent (and by recent, I mean the last ten years) streak of unapproved music use. Prominent examples include Adele, The White Stripes, Sabrina Carpenter, Celine Dion, Neil Young, Olivia Rodrigo, the Rolling Stones, Pharrell, Rihanna, the Foo Fighters, and, of course, Bruce Springsteen, whom Trump now spends his time calling a “dried-up prune” on his Truth Social account. The current administration’s latest musical embarrassment comes right on the heels of an even bigger one: as of writing, almost every artist originally billed to appear in the upcoming Freedom 250 concert series has dropped out after facing massive public backlash.
Read our review of Boards of Canada’s new album Inferno here.
