To review an album like Substrata, I believe a good way to start is by looking at the cover image. White prevails, a color that evokes an immense frozen or snowy expanse; in the box at the center, however, distant, immovable mountains stand out, overshadowed by a clear blue sky.
The color choice, combined with the beautiful photo taken of a Nordic landscape, conveys precise sensations, reminiscent of cold, winter, and the sounds of a nature we believe we control in an illusory manner when it is, on the contrary, dominating us.
These vibrations captured by our senses find perfect synthesis in the eleven tracks of the album, a monolith of ambient electronics that, twenty-five years after its release, continues to surprise and reveal unseen details with each new listening.
Geir Jennsen, aka Biosphere, achieves an authentic miracle with Substrata. The Norwegian producer, in fact, does not just abandon the ambient-house rhythms of Microgravity by opting for a dark, muffled, and minimalist sound, but he creates a timeless masterpiece, a symphony in multiple movements that manages to transpose into music solitude, silence, melancholy and, at the same time, the charm of the polar winter.
The greatness of Substrata, in short, is not only expressed in its suspended compositions, formed by loops that refer to situations of stasis, repetition, or immobility, but above all in the ability to blend nature and artifice, music and life, through the use of recordings stolen by Biosphere during his excursions and perfectly harmonized within the arrangements.
Thus, in "As the Sun Kissed the Horizon" we find distant voices intertwined with an airplane cutting through the night sky, while the flow of water anticipates the unsettling atmospheres of "Chukhung", full of echoes and reverberations. There are also intimate moments like "Times When I Know You'll Be Sad", where the crackling or popping of wood, followed by a flanged guitar sample, makes us think of a day spent indoors when snow falls outside and everything is enveloped in a thick fog. And in "Sphere of No-Form" there's even the whistling of the wind accompanying us through icy, desolate soundscapes.
Biosphere's exploration is relentless: the Scandinavian musician plunders words, rustles, and even dialogues from the cult series Twin Peaks, which give a narrative dimension to the keyboard and synth interweavings of "The Things I Tell You" or the dreamlike "Hyperborea", a track that seems to allude to woods and mysterious paranormal encounters (it is no coincidence that the voice of Major Briggs is sampled, a character who disappeared into nothingness while he was in the woods surrounding the well-known town).
The final result exceeds not only excellence but also any possible expectations. Substrata is indeed one of those works for which the definition "classic" can truly be used liberally, an immersive experience able to suspend time and space, almost comparable to a dream.
It matters little if the rhythms of Microgravity and Patashnik are absent or reduced to simple suggestions, inserts that infiltrate our subconscious like birdsong or the sound of a mountain stream. What matters is the overall framework and Substrata fully hits the mark, to the point of being remembered even today as one of the most important albums in the history of electronic music.
Let's then be lulled by the guitar notes of "Poa Alpina", a wonderful piece capable of infusing peace, tranquility, bliss. Because Geir Jennsen is capable of this too, a sound alchemist who, on his third attempt, reaches the undisputed peak of his artistic production.
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