Tomorrow's Harvest features seventeen tracks written and composed by Marcus Eoin and Mike Sandison. In an interview with The Guardian, Sandison discussed the songwriting process of the tracks, stating: "we often jam something down quickly and you tend to find those things are the ones with a great instant melody." Sandison said that "crafting the tunes into a specific style and time period we want to reference" was a challenging aspect of the process, further noting that "there's a deliberate VHS video-nasty element throughout the record", which was achieved by timing changes in the composition and music to simulate film soundtracks from "around 30 years ago."
Sandison elaborated on the elements of the compositions, including the introduction on "Gemini" and the final sections of "New Seeds", and hoped that they would "imply a visual element." He further explained that some of the tracks finish prematurely, "like actual cues in older soundtracks where they've been ripped out of much longer original masters that nobody ever gets to hear." Sandison described Tomorrow's Harvest's final track, "Semena Mertvykh" (translated from Russian "Семена мёртвых" - "Seeds of the Dead"), as having "a deliberate feeling of complete futility." He also stated that the album was "loaded with patterns and messages" and that the duo used more subliminals on Tomorrow's Harvest than they had on their previous studio albums.
Several film soundtrack composers influenced Tomorrow's Harvest's sound. Boards of Canada listed John Carpenter, Fabio Frizzi, John Harrison and Mark Isham, as well as "grim 70s and 80s movie soundtrack" composers, such as Stefano Mainetti, Riz Ortolani, Paul Giovanni and Wendy Carlos.
The front cover artwork for Tomorrow's Harvest features a blurred shot of the city skyline in San Francisco, California, United States. The photograph was taken from Alameda Naval Air Station, a closed naval air station in Alameda, on the San Francisco Bay.[3] Commenting on the artwork, Marcus Eoin referred to it as "an ingredient of the theme on this record" and added, "if you look again at the San Francisco skyline on the cover, it's actually a ghost of the city. You're looking straight through it."
Some, including music magazine The Quietus speculated that the album title was inspired by Deadly Harvest, a 1977 Canadian film about climate change and widespread crop failures in North America, noting that "this idea seems to be reflected by the song titles", in particular "Cold Earth", "Sick Times" and "New Seeds", as well as "the album sleeve and the overall mood of the record." Andrew Burke points out that
The album's dominant themes, environmental collapse and the degradation and decay of the landscape, fit closely with a strain of genre cinema from the 1970s and 1980s. Most significant perhaps is a late 1970s Canadian film Deadly Harvest released on VHS, an eco-thriller about dwindling resources that features an eerie synth score by John Mills-Cockell.
Erwann Perchoc suggests Mills-Cockell's score anticipates both the sound of the duo and common themes such as agricultural revolt and the end of the world.
Boards of Canada
- Marcus Eoin – production, recording, design, artwork
- Mike Sandison – production, recording, design, artwork
- Phonographic Copyright ℗ – Warp Records Limited
- Copyright © – Warp Records Limited
- Published By – Warp Music
- Recorded At – Hexagon Sun
- Pressed By – MPO
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