Biosphere ‎| Shenzhou (3LP) [BIO27LP]

Biosphere ‎| Shenzhou
Label: Biophon Records ‎– BIO27LP
Format: 3 × Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue
Released| 08 Dec 2017

Paul Cooper, Pitchfork: ""Shenzhou", aside from being the name of the Chinese manned-spaceflight vehicles, means "magic vessel", and I can't imagine a more apt description for Geir Jenssen's latest excursion into ambient deep listening. After following an Aphexian trajectory with his releases on Apollo, the ambient sublabel of Belgium's R&S; Records, Jenssen veered from the padded sci-fi-inspired techno of Microgravity and Patashnik with 1997's Substrata, a genre-defining exploration of drifting soundscapes. Substrata remains for many the album that perfectly expresses the serenity and intensity of Arctic wildernesses, a landscape Jenssen knows intimately, having spent much of his life in the Norwegian Arctic Circle.

In 2000, Jenssen nearly eclipsed the success of Substrata with Cirque, a frequently frosty submerging of excerpted conversations and found environmental sounds that rivals Wolfgang Voigt's Gas project in its rumbling, gauzy beauty. Jenssen again relies on found sound as source material for Shenzhou, but this time, the found sound is old vinyl recordings of the orchestral works of French Impressionist composer and ambient precursor, Claude Debussy. Jenssen lifts fragments of these scratched records in a similar manner as he did for Cirque's "Black Lamb Grey Falcon" and "Iberia Eterea".

The ten tracks (out of the dozen on the album) that follow this model all begin as a barely audible hum, like a small electrical transformer, out of which the dust-dappled loops of Debussy's woodwind, brass, and strings emerge, condense, and fade out into pink noise rustles. Unlike Steve Reich's phase pieces or Brian Eno's Discreet Music, though, Jenssen doesn't set his loops against each other to produce juxtapositions and piquant dissonance; he uses them to describe imagined terrain, at first glance monotonously flat and barren, but on concentration, replete with minute detailing. The overall effect of these pieces is a sense of immensity. The orchestral loops sound distant, abandoned in a vast wilderness, and strenuously battling against Arctic winds. Jenssen sets the listener down in this wilderness as an aloof observer, a witness to the music's futile struggles against entropic forces.

The two tracks not derived from Debussy share the same hypnotic aesthetic. The brief interlude "Bose-Einstein Condension" is a loop of piano chords lolloping in search of coherence, while "Gravity Assist" is a longer voyage into woofer-quaking low-frequency manipulation, bell-like drones, and contrails of subdued noise. I can't help but feel that these tracks fit awkwardly and break up the conceptual flow of the album. This, however, is a minor quibble given the power of this music. Shenzhou is unquestionably a magic vessel, but one that reveals its enchantment only to those who pay close attention."

TRACKLIST:
     Shenzhou
A1     Shenzhou     
A2     Spindrift     
A3     Heat Leak     
B1     Ancient Campfire     
B2     Houses On The Hill     
C1     Two Ocean Plateau     
C2     Thermal Motion     
C3     Path Leading To The High Grass     
C4     Fast Atoms Escape     
D1     Green Reflections     
D2     Bose-Einstein Condensation     
D3     Gravity Assist     
    The Samphire Tower
E1     Griz Nez Windy     
E2     Dover Ferryport     
E3     Kent Country Train     
E4     Lorry Shuttle Shaft     
E5     Sea Cat     
F1     Shuttle Hiss Tunnel     
F2     Calais Ferryport     
F3     Shuttle     
F4     The White Cliffs Of Dover

# Experimental # Ambient # Electronica