Music to Forget? A Love Letter From Bette to Biosphere's Substrata
One of my favourite music genres is music you forget you’re listening to, but which moves you nonetheless. I guess in an ideal world that would be the definition of ambient music, but there is ambient music that barely moves me, just as there is ambient music that, while it moves me, commands my attention. Biosphere’s Substrata may be the most moving and yet least commanding album I know. It has masked the noise in busy cafes while I pored over writing or research, and helped me to sleep when the neighbours wouldn’t. It has soundtracked my experiments with gender affirmation pre-transition, lending candles a shamanic glow as they faintly lit my transformed self in a mirror. And each time I’ve heard it, whether I’ve listened or not, it has earthed me, reconnected me to something vital.
“Sorry to wake you,” says the giant from Twin Peaks 15 minutes in. “The things I tell you will not be wrong.” By which stage, as Geir Jenssen AKA Biosphere must know, it really is as though we are waking, briefly, as the giant speaks and then is silent. The things he tells us? They are beyond words, and no, they are not wrong. Substrata, like a dream, defies language, even when Jenssen forces words upon it. “Times when I know you’ll be sad,” sings an amateurish choir, almost whispering, over a quaint, chorused guitar-line, once the giant has stopped his tossing and turning. Later, we’re back in Twin Peaks (evidently Jenssen is a fan) as the Major intones, “The vision, clear as a mountain stream, the mind revealing itself to itself.” But, having gently woken, we fall back asleep, to swim in the haze.
Throughout, there are landmarks, parts that pierce memory: the pulsing 5-beat synth and arpeggiated guitar of “Chukhung”; the discordant chimes of “Antennaria”; the demented foghorn of “Sphere of No Form”. Birds, footsteps, branches snapping – found sounds, like voices, provide the light. But the music is murk and looming shadows, the tolling of a cosmic bell. “Warmth” is an overused word in production and, given that Geir Jenssen records in an isolated house outside Tromsø, Norway, over 350 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, it’s probably inaccurate in this case. But that tremulous-yet-pulsing airy-yet-earthy low end may be the doomladen secret to his success. As may be the slow, patient unfolding of these structures, which I like to think comes naturally in snowed-in solitude, the wind roaring in the sound.
I’m told that Substrata is a classic – some say the best ambient album ever – but I missed it in 1997, discovering it via algorithm 20 years later. In truth, at first it didn’t grab me, but if a friend had dubbed me a cassette of it in ’97 I would have treasured that tape as much as the Autechre mix I used to thrash late at nights when I’d over-listened to The Infamous Mobb Deep. From a ’97 standpoint, it would have been undeniable, the ultimate comedown album. As to Jenssen’s other work, Shenzhou is the standout, I think, less commanding but less moving, and certainly less iconic. That said, closing track “Gravity Assist” may be the ultimate Biosphere jam, pensive and rippling, and supremely easy to drift out into. Inland Delta, uncharacteristically composed entirely with analogue synthesisers, came out last year and is also excellent.
Geir Jenssen, a Joy Division fan who bought his first synth in 1983, is 62 years old. I sometimes think if I could visit any studio it would be his studio, in that house by the cold sea where he so patiently weaves his dark dreams.
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