The Higher Intelligence Agency & Biosphere
Polar Sequences

Biosphere + Higher Intelligence Agency.

That is, two giants of 1990s ambient techno in a joint work that will simply make history.

The collaboration as such is quite singular, first of all because it is composed live on commission during the Polar Music Festival (1995) at Biosphere's operational base (Tromsø), recording and manipulating the location's sounds at the top of a mountain. Secondly, because more than a "union of forces," it is a "division of tasks," meaning that the two maintain their respective stylistic traits to the point of being able to determine, obviously if one has listened to at least a minimal part of their solo work, which specific fragments were mainly the work of H.I.A., and which were of the cryptic Norwegian producer. When with "Cimmerian Shaft" you encounter thirteen minutes of pure Arctic-ambient paranoia, atmospheres where calling them dark is a mere euphemism, and the entire inventory of direct local capture (wind, thunder, rain, the sounds of cable cars), well, it is very clear that Mr. Geir Jenssen has worked hard; just as in the futuristic synths and the crystalline rhythms of the hypnotic "Snapshot Survey" or the "natural" "Countdown to Darkness" there is an idea more easily attributable to the English colleague, yet clearly well supported by what were the stylistic elements of that particular period within Biosphere's production (sci-fi samples, cosmic-glacial motif, deeply organic textures).

So, the two work excellently together, and the high quality of the work underlines this more than a thousand words. Try listening to how the sick analog raga of "White Lightning", between dark-ambient scores and industrial accents, perfectly achieves its hypnotic intent, or how the trip "Meltwater" (pure field recording - zero artificial interventions) manages to recreate the now-famous mental landscapes (otherwise known as musical biospheres) that have made every Jenssen record an authentic extrasensory journey. 

In short, mental biospheres, higher intelligences, polar field recording... it only remains to dive into the android atmospheres of "Corona" to understand what kind of stuff has come out of it. The two will repeat the formula four years later with a follow-up with a similar formula (but this time in Bird's Birmingham and with clearly less glacial recordings - children, animals, traffic, etc.) that will arrive when the ambient-techno phenomenon has already faded away, but it relooks at that "world" in an updated version for the new digital millennium, overall more or less valid, especially if taken as an integral part of this same project. However, if you absolutely have to choose, throw yourself headlong into this first release, absolutely immense.