Biosphere (musician)

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Biosphere is the main recording name of Geir Jenssen (born 1962), a Norwegian musician who has released a notable catalogue of ambient electronic music. He is well known for his "ambient techno" and "arctic ambient" styles, his use of music loops, and peculiar samples from sci-fi sources. His track "Novelty Waves" was used for the 1995 campaign of Levi's. His 1997 album Substrata is generally seen as one of the all time classic ambient albums [1].

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[edit] History

[edit] (1962-1991) Prior to Biosphere

Jenssen was born in 1962 in Tromsø, a city within the Arctic Circle in the northernmost portion of Norway. He would later become famous for his "arctic sound".

In 1983, he composed his first piece of music. In 1985, Jenssen was part of the newly-created Norwegian moody synth trio Bel Canto. They released their first two albums together. In 1989, he left the band in order to pursue a different music style altogether.

Throughout the late 1980s, Jenssen used the moniker Bleep, under which he produced various 12" records. His early influences were from Acid House and New Beat music.

Released In 1990, The North Pole By Submarine was his first solo album. This album would, however, also mark the end of both the Bleep moniker and a distinct change in artistic direction.

[edit] (1991-Present) as Biosphere

Following the release of The North Pole By Submarine, Jenssen chose a new musical direction and began releasing his music as Biosphere on obscure Norwegian compilation albums, marking a major stylistic change as well as avoiding any association with "bleep house" (as made popular in the early 1990's by the Sheffield UK-based Warp Records).

Released in 1991, Microgravity was the first full-length Biosphere album, released on the small Norwegian label Origo Sound. Previously, Jenssen had failed to get his new album released to a wider listening base by the Belgian record label SSR (a sublabel of the renowned Crammed Discs label), who weren't sure what to make of the arctic influenced and obscure sci-fi and cult-movie sample driven ambient house that made up most of the album. Eventually, Jenssen did manage to get the album released on the R&S Records subsidiary Apollo in 1992, to much critical acclaim.

In 1994, the second Biosphere album, Patashnik, was released. Through Patashnik, Jenssen continued to explore his ambient-house stylings to an even greater extent. Patashnik contained the first hints of the reduction in beat-driven song structure that would mark later Biosphere releases. Unlike the first album, Patashnik was quickly picked up by a comparatively large international audience, which brought Biosphere greater recognition.

In 1995, Levi Strauss & Co. was searching for a new angle to add to their television advertisement campaign (which up to that point had never featured electronic music), and they decided to use the uptempo track "Novelty Waves" from Patashnik. Shortly thereafter, "Novelty Waves" was released as a single (featuring remixes by various other artists), and managed to chart in several countries. Although Jenssen never regretted his approval for use of the track, he also never sought this kind of fame and subsequently turned down various requests by his record company and peers to collaborate with well-known Techno and Drum 'n Bass artists or to create a follow-up album in the same style. During that same year, Biosphere contributed the song "The Seal and the Hydrophone" exclusively to Apollo 2 - The Divine Compilation released by Apollo Records.

Released in 1997, Substrata is a purely atmospheric ambient Biosphere album, released on All Saints Records. Substrata, which marked Jenssen's embarkation towards an intensely minimal style, is not only often considered to be Jenssen's best work to date, but is also seen as one of the all time classic ambient albums[1]. Substrata contains notable samples from the American TV Show Twin Peaks.

In 2000, Jenssen released Cirque on his new home Touch Records, an ambient album driven by muffled beats, samples, and minimal atmospherics. Though Cirque briefly revisited territory covered by earlier Biosphere releases, the rhythm section throughout the album remains an element of the background, unlike Jenssen's first two Biosphere releases, wherein the drums occupied a dominating proportion of the foreground.

In 2002, Shenzhou was released. Shenzhou, Jenssen's fifth full length album under the name Biosphere, was a more abstract work, comparable to Aphex Twin's 1994 album Selected Ambient Works Volume II. The material on the album draws from elongated, pitch-shifted loops taken from Debussy's La Mer (The Sea) [1], and Jeux.

Released in 2004, Autour de la Lune stands as the most minimal and austere Biosphere album to date. The drones employed on this album are comparable to Coil's 1998 album Time Machines in their timbre and slow rate of change. The bulk of this work was originally commissioned and broadcast in September 2003 by Radio France Culture for a musical evocation of Jules Verne.

Most recently, in 2006, Jenssen released Dropsonde, a half beatless, half rhythmic album comprised of jazz rhythms evocative of Miles Davis' 1970s jazz fusion works. A partial vinyl sampler was released a few months earlier in 2005.

[edit] Live

Biosphere regularly performs live during electronic music festivals and in clubs throughout Europe and various other locales around the world. Live performances usually consist of Jenssen performing improvisations or variations on newer tracks on a laptop while video art is projected behind him; for example, full-screen video art was projected in his Picturehouse cinema tour in April 2006. Although these performances are rarely tied specifically to a recent album release, the uptempo material from the Bleep and Microgravity/Patashnik era is rarely featured in Biosphere performances.

In May of 2004, Biosphere's first United States performance took place in Detroit.

There will be no more Biosphere concerts in 2008. According to the official Biosphere website "he is tired of flying and hates airports, security checks, unhealthy food, air conditioning, hotels, etc."

[edit] Discography

[edit] Solo discography

[edit] Collaboration discography

Usually as "Geir Jenssen" instead of "Biosphere":

[edit] Miscellaneous

  • Jenssen is also an active climber and mountaineer. His highest feat was in 2001, the Cho Oyu (Himalaya, 8201 meters) sans oxygen. This hobby can be an inspiration on his work, as well as a source of natural sound samples.
  • All Biosphere album titles allude to the cold environments of space or ice, and their exploration:
    • The Biosphere 2 project intended to explore the possible use of an artificial biosphere (a closed ecosystem) for space colonization. The Russian Biosphere 3 too. Both are detached, self-sufficient environments, like a space ship or a submarine.
    • The North Pole explored by a submarine, which may be lost like a ship in space.
    • Microgravity is the imperfect state of weightlessness in a space ship.
    • The word "patashnik" is allegedly Russian cosmonaut slang for "a traveler" or "a goner", a cosmonaut who didn't return from a space mission because his security cable disengaged and he was lost in space.
    • Substrata is, among others, a glaciology term (always plural) for the nature of a glacier's bed. Phonetically, it's also the Russian word for "frozen ground" (the permafrost).
    • A cirque is an amphitheatre-like valley formed by glacial erosion. It also refers to the death of Chris McCandless, a sort of "patashnik" who explored self-sufficient survival in a cirque in Alaska and lost himself.
    • Shenzhou refers to the Chinese Shenzhou spacecraft.
    • Autour de la Lune (1870, Round the Moon) was Jules Verne's followup to De la Terre à la Lune (1865, From the Earth to the Moon). The first one dealt with the Earth part of the story until the ship's launching, from the outside. Autour de la Lune dealt from the inside of the ship with the launching and the actual space travel to and around the moon [2]. The album's titles are French for "Translatory", "Rotatory", "Modified", "Vibratory", "Deviation", "Rotary", "Disappeared", "Reverse", "Falling".
    • A dropsonde is a device designed to be dropped at altitude to collect data as the device falls to the ground – in this context, it's a sonde sent through space to another planet, it's another "patashnik" explorator intended to be lost.

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b See "Classic Ambient Recordings: The 2001 Survey" at Hyperreal.org

[edit] External links

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Discographies
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