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Album: Cirque [ALBUM]
Track: 1 of 11
Title: Nook and Cranny
Artist: Biosphere
Label: Touch
Cat#: TO46CD
Formats:
Digital Release: 5th February 2007
Physical Release: 5th February 2007
About This Release:
Following the successful release on Ash International, 'Cho Oyu 8201m' by Geir Jenssen, Touch is reissuing the classic 'Cirque' by Biosphere, originally issued in 2000.
Here, the shifting world of 'Substrata' is fused with the liquid electronic rhythms of Biosphere's earlier work. The outcome is almost addictive - layers of detail revealing themselves as you listen and appreciate the convergences deep within the music, between classical and pop, the soundtrack and its voiceover.
CIRQUE is inspired in part by the story of Chris McCandless, who in April 1992 hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness, only to be found dead four months later having made a tragic error with his food supply. CIRQUE reflects this idealism, but also the danger lurking in paradise. The music plays like a film, one scene dissolving into the next. Codas pinpoint the action like spotlights, and location recordings weave in and out of the sound giving it the dramatic tension of a great documentary. There is nothing old-fashioned, however, in the outcome. CIRQUE is future music. Cinema for the spirit.
Reviews for This Release:
"Here's a challenge: Try to keep your eyes open through to the end of this disc. It's impossible. From the opening strains of "Nook & Cranny", with its distant synth refrains and soft fizzy beats, to the haunting last gasp of clipped flutes on "Too Fragile to Walk On",
Biosphere wraps the listener's ears in sound as lulling as that heard in the womb. To call this music "techno" does it a great injustice.
Biopshere (a.k.a. Norway's Geir Jenssen) uses "real" instruments to flesh out his mostly beatless sound, such as guitar, piano, woodwinds
and strings. Combine this with a skill for crafting drifting machine sounds not rivaled since Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol. II,
and what follows is warm and comforting, belying the album's glacial artwork. The information accompanying this disc warns of lurking in paradise for too long, but if there is danger awaiting listeners on the other side of Cirque, may they die blissfully ignorant." - Jason Olariu (Alternative Press)
"Masterful - warming up otherwise icy climes with orchestral loops and multi-hued sunlight." - Philip Sherburne (XLR8R)
"Geir Jenssen left his first band, late '80s group Bel Canto, to develop his own musical direction after releasing two albums. He went on to record two techno albums and four singles as Bleep. Adopting the name Biosphere from the sealed, domed experiment in self-sufficient living based in the Arizona desert, Jenssen released two increasingly successful ambient techno albums, Microgravity and Patashnik. After the single "Novelty Waves" from Patashnik was used in a Levi Jean's ad, rather than use the sound as formula for future works, Jenssen moved away from it, his music becoming increasingly less like techno. The last three Biosphere albums, Polar Sequences and Birmingham Frequencies with Higher Intelligence Agency, and Substrata, the last real Biosphere album some 3 years ago, are
relatively minimal and spacious, not completely devoid of beats but more ambient than techno.
It's hard to isolate any one given track to review as the music fits together wonderfully as a single piece, flowing naturally from tract
to track. Jenssen's music is referred to in the press and on his website as having an "arctic sound", and it is easy to appreciate why. The packaging of his albums commonly shows several images of iceflows and frozen landscapes and is printed in shades of blue, grey and white, reflecting the terrain he is familiar with and samples for his music, the word cirque itself is defined as "a semicircular
amphitheatre-shaped feature with steep walls carved by a glacier".
This fascination or love of his surrounding terrain is reflected in Jenssen's music, conjuring up images of vast expanses of snow, ice and rock, the beauty such a sight is to witness and the inherent danger this can ultimately bring. The Cirque album itself is at least partly inspired by Chris McCandless, who in April 1992 hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness, only to be found dead 4 months later having made a tragic error with his food supply.
Jenssen's work acts on a very emotional level, one that encourages you to drift away into a haze of images and scenes brought to you by
the music, where spectacular beauty hide...
