Released: 2002
Style: Experimental, Ambient
"Geir Jenssen aka Biosphere often appears to need a creative cue, if not a concept, to kickstart an album. One inspiration for the glacial textures of his first set for Touch, Cirque (2000) was the story of the ill-fated Chris McCandless, who hitchhiked to Alaska in April 1992, skimped on is food supply, and was found dead four months later. Last year, Touch also reissue his 1997 quiet classic, Substrata, in a lavishly packaged, remastered and expanded version, which came out of a climbing trip he made in the Himalayas. But, far from the great outdoors, a French composer seeded his latest album, Shenzhou: the first ten tracks, confess the minimal sleevenotes, were inspired by the orchestral works of Claude Debussy. It's a testament to Jenssen that throughout the set Debussy's influence is always felt explicitly, even as it never threatens to overwhelm the production as a whole. The classical source material is frozen, sampled and looped, like an audio Polaroid, into short one- or two-bar segments of woodwind, strings and the occasional harp. These central motifs, repeated mesmerically, form the bedrock of a series of lovingly crafted atmospheres and zones, around which Jenssen pumps dense clouds of beatless ambience, ominously rumbling bass notes and endlessly shifting, impressionistic textures. Similar but never the same, the effect, over expanding repetitions, is lie watching the infinite variations of ripples in water.Jenssen still resides in Tromso, 30 miles inside the Arctic circle on the northern coast of Norway. No surprise, then, that critics astutely picked up on the 'iciness' of the sound of the albums he made for the R&S offshoot Apollo in the early 90s. On this showing, though, the overall feel is more pastoral and warm, a quality alluded to in track titles like "pathleadingtothehighgrass" and "greenreflections", and the CD artwork's photos of leaves, water, skies. Partly due to the disc's classical sound palette, perhaps, the rustic imagery makes more sense here than on other recent 'folksy' electronic releases. If the textures of Shenzhou don't exactly grab the attention, they do mirror the natural world with unusual subtlety." - The Wire
Tracklisting:
1 Shenzhou (5:04)
2 Spindrift (4:37)
3 Ancient Campfire (7:45)
4 Heat Leak (4:57)
5 Houses On The Hill (5:43)
6 Two Ocean Plateau (3:10)
7 Thermal Motion (4:27)
8 Path Leading To The High Grass (3:55)
9 Fast Atoms Escape (3:29)
10 Green Reflections (3:32)
11 Bose-Einstein Condensation (2:47)
12 Gravity Assist (7:04)
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