Biosphere
Substrata

The dripping of water. The singing of birds. The whisper of the wind. Acoustic ingredients that compose the mosaic of "Substrata": the third album by Biosphere, released in 1997 and among his most renowned works. The territory is that of a collected and intimate ambient music, which in each of the eleven tracks draws a sound sketch of an imaginary landscape.

Although the tracks are interconnected without interruption, each has a precise stylistic connotation: thus avoiding potential monotony, the main risk of ambient music. From the four repeated sounds of "Poa Alpina" to the pulsing of a single sound in the following track, "Chukhung", from the harmonic progression of "Times When I Know You'll Be Sad", obsessively repeated within what could be considered an offbeat song, to the drone of "Hyperborea" on which an off-voice from an episode of the TV series Twin Peaks is inserted.

And I could go on, given that the tracks are all structurally different from each other (even in the choice of sampled voices: in "Kobresia" it's a fragment in Russian related to a telepathy experiment...). The Norwegian Geir Jenssen—this is the true identity hidden behind the stage name Biosphere— is skillful enough to articulate each piece, which often sees an evolution (if not a proper variation) of the starting materials.

"Substrata" has become a classic work in the realm of ambient electronic, so much so that in 2001 it was reissued in a double CD format (the first CD contains the remaster of the original, the second a soundtrack for a 1929 film by Dziga Vertov). An important milestone to understand the evolution of a musician who gained attention with Bel Canto, an ethereal synth trio of which Jenssen was a part at the end of the '80s, for the first two albums released by that band.