Touch Format: 2xCD
To call Substrata a good album is an understatement. It has been described as one of the finest Ambient albums of the Nineties. As far as I’m concerned you can scrub out the bit about the Nineties. Biosphere, a.k.a. Geir Jenssen from Norway, has created some of the most amazing Ambient music I’ve heard in a very long time. Substrata is an album to play at full volume in sub-zero conditions.
This re-release of Substrata is a lovingly-designed two CD edition containing two extra tracks that were released on the Japanese version of the album, along with the Man With a Movie Camera. In 1996 Geir Jenssen was asked to write a new soundtrack for Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov‘s 1929 silent film of the same name, and hopefully one day the score and film will be placed together in some medium or other.
The Japanese tracks are the only tracks on either CD that can be said to have a beat in any conventional electronic sense of the word. They are good mechanical forward moving Trance tracks. Apart from these the album is beat free. It pulsates slowly and statically. The music is beautifully still. Tracks like “The Things I Tell You” and “Chukhung” are made up of delicate hovering melodies. “Hyperborea” is as ice cold and austere as possible. “Sphere of No Form” is at points soft then harsh then soft again. Large Buddhist horns of infinite length obliterate the barely perceptible sound of the wind; in time the harsh endless echoed horns are themselves replaced by lush analogue ripples. The soundtrack for Man With A Movie Camera is haunting and colossal. It is a collected of wonderfully crafted soundscapes. Concrete sound mixes with pulsations, drifting distant voices, and dislocated moments of sampled music.
Superb stuff.
-AP-
