BIOSPHERE Vinilo y CD

Review: Geir Jenssen (Biosphere) marks his AD93 debut with The Way Of Time, wrapping elucted echo and looping synth drift around spoken fragments of Elizabeth Madox Roberts' great 1926 novel The Time Of Man. A Midwestern gothic literary staple, Roberts' novel is about the daughter of a Kentucky tenant farmer, and Jenssen's haunting use of Joan Lorring's voice from the 1951 radio play adaptation readapts his usual icy predilections for suitably huger desert horizons. Rather than treating the vocal as ornament, he folds it deep into the mix, letting it dissolve into the melodic architecture.

Review: Elizabeth Madox Roberts' The Time Of Man (1926) is an episodic modern novel, tracing the life of Ellen Chesser, the daughter of poor white tenant farmers in rural Kentucky. Roberts treats the main character's movement through different landscapes and seasons waveringly, grappling with poverty, loss, love, and the push-pull between solitude and connection by way of a lytic narrative that shifts and resolves atemporally. Biosphere's new record carries the transmission chain further, naming itself after the novel while interspersing its hiss-topped drum machine actions with vocal snippets from Joan Lorring's radio play version. Slowly transcendent, Biosphere presides with arid royalty over a slow but satiating new six-track release.

Review: The release of any new Biosphere album is cause for celebration, especially when the man himself - the great Geir Jenssen - has chosen a specific theme or concept. 'Inland Delta', his first new full-length for almost two years, features (in his words) "mostly improvised performances on newly restored vintage keyboards". In practice, that means a slightly more colourful and fluid ambient sound than some of his many ambient albums, plus inherent warmth missing from his often icy compositions. There's plenty to set the pulse racing throughout, from the slow-moving cinematic bliss of 'Franklin's Dream' and the shuffling shimmer of 'Delta Function', to the becalmed, slowly unfurling dreaminess of 'The String Thing' and the Tangerine Dream-does-ambient loveliness of 'Florian's Flute'.

Review: Norwegian ambient maestro Biosphere continues to offer up expansive new editions of some of the many classic albums in his bulging back catalogue. The latest to get the treatment is 2004 set 'Autor De La Lune', which began life when he was commissioned by French radio to create a piece using something from their archive. He chose a radio dramatization of a Jules Verne story about a trip to the moon, sampled it up, threw in some recordings of the MIR space station, and then added his own instrumentation. The results - and particularly the stunning, 21-minute opener 'Translation' - are as inspired, minimalistic and atmospheric as you'd expect. This edition includes a second disc with five further pieces recorded as part of the project, but which have never been released before.

Review: After a run of reissues and a boundary-blurring fusion of classical music and electronica (January 2021's Angel's Flight), Norwegian ambient veteran Geir Jennsen AKA Biosphere has gone back to basics on Shortwave Memories. Ditching software and computers for analogue synths, drum machines and effects units, Jennsen has delivered album that he claims was inspired by the post-punk era electronics of Daniel Miller and Matin Hannett, but instead sounds like a new, less dancefloor-conscious take on the hybrid ambient/techno sound he was famous for in the early 1990s. The results are uniformly brilliant, making this one of the Norwegian trailblazer's most alluring and sonically comforting albums for decades.

Review: After a run of reissues and a boundary-blurring fusion of classical music and electronica (January 2021's Angel's Flight), Norwegian ambient veteran Geir Jennsen AKA Biosphere has gone back to basics on Shortwave Memories. Ditching software and computers for analogue synths, drum machines and effects units, Jennsen has delivered album that he claims was inspired by the post-punk era electronics of Daniel Miller and Matin Hannett, but instead sounds like a new, less dancefloor-conscious take on the hybrid ambient/techno sound he was famous for in the early 1990s. The results are uniformly brilliant, making this one of the Norwegian trailblazer's most alluring and sonically comforting albums for decades.

Review: Over the last few years, Geir Jennsen has been quietly offering up re-mastered and often expanded reissues of many of his most sought-after albums, including many that have previously never been released on wax. He's at it again here, delivering a weighty triple-vinyl version of one of his lesser-celebrated LPs, 2006's "Dropsone", which boasts seven previously unheard tracks and alternate takes recorded during the same period. Musically, it's one of the most unique sets in Jennsen's catalogue, in part because it mixes his usual ambient textures, chords and melodies with simmering strings, warmer melodies and - most notably - some genuine jazz rhythms. Whereas many of his albums are icy and otherworldly, "Dropsone" is positively sun-kissed and summery.

Review: Any new release from reclusive Norwegian ambient colossus Geir Jennsen is cause for celebration. The Petrified Forest was inspired by a 1936 movie of the same name, the plot of which revolves around a world-weary British writer meeting a fellow idealist in an isolated diner in the middle of the Arizona desert. Jenssen's music has always been cinematic in tone - think widescreen visions with multiple related movements, sitting somewhere between icy loneliness and comforting homeliness - so it's little surprise to find that The Petrified Forest regularly hits the mark. Evocative, atmospheric and quietly melodiousness, it's a mini album chock full of brilliant downtempo electronica.

Review: Geir Jensson's debut album under the now familiar Biosphere alias, Microgravity, has long been considered something of a classic of the early '90s ambient boom. First released in 1991, it offered an icy but suitably atmospheric mix of chilly ambience, British-style "intelligent techno" and crystalline IDM. To celebrate 25 years since it was recorded (it was released a year later, in 1991), Geir Jensson has re-mastered it and, with the help of a successful crowd-funding campaign, pressed it onto a double CD minus the cross-fades and sound effects featured on the original pressing. Happily, Microgravity has lost none of its allure.