Boards of Canada - Reach for the Dead (from Tomorrow's Harvest)

What this video is

Released May 2013 as the lead single from Tomorrow's Harvest, Boards of Canada's first album in eight years, the video emerged at the climax of an elaborate cryptic ARG marketing campaign involving coded radio broadcasts, Record Store Day vinyl drops, and a Tokyo outdoor premiere. The film's imagery of American desert ghost towns and abandoned mid-century structures synthesizes hauntological themes of environmental…

Why it matters

A landmark artifact of 2010s IDM/ambient music video culture, demonstrating how Warp Records-era artists deployed hyper-intentional analog film aesthetics to resist digital contemporaneity. The video's landscape-only, performance-free structure — unusually pure even for the genre — reinforced…

The director

Neil Krug (b. 1983, Lawrence, Kansas) is a self-taught American visual artist, photographer, and director based in Los Angeles, CA. Known for psychedelic, cinematic, retro-analog imagery, he published the viral Pulp Art Book (2010–2012) with model Joni…