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Biosphere, “The Way of Time” (AD93, 2025)

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This latest album from Geir Jenssen’s long-running ambient/techno project admittedly blindsided me a bit, as I had not been keeping up with his recent releases on his own Biophon label. If I had been, I would have known that he’s been on a bit of a synthesizer album kick lately, but The Way of Time is quite a bold outlier even within this current era, as the emotional heart of the album is a series of samples of Joan Lorring’s voice from a 1951 radio play of Elizabeth Madox Roberts’ The Time Of Man (first published in 1926). 

In broad strokes, the novel is a coming-of-age story that follows a poor girl from rural Kentucky farming community through her life of hardship and seems to be about the strength of the human spirit and finding simple joy in community and the natural world. While Jenssen sparingly uses only a few choice passages, Lorring’s wistful sense of wonder packs quite an emotional wallop within the context of Biosphere’s darkly futuristic synth motifs.

Notably, there are two pieces that tower above everything else on this album: “The Way of Time” and “Like The End of The World.” The first piece is built upon a tensely burbling synth motif that initially sounds like it could have been a slowed-down Caterina Barbieri piece and a repeating sample of Lorring’s Ellen Chesser character observing “night comes and then it gets to be day and that’s the way of time” in a hopeful-sounding Southern drawl. As the piece unfolds, however, the intricate web of interwoven synth melodies seems to speed up and deepen in intensity. It has the ominous feel of walls closing in, which Jenssen capitalizes on in devastating fashion with a final sample of Chesser lamenting that she’s never been to the ocean or found true love and that she is now growing old.

The synth theme in “Like The End of the World” is even more coldly futuristic-sounding, but it works brilliantly as a pure synth piece once the slow, lurching stomp of the beat locks into place and a rhythmic melodic hook loops into the groove. The sample that Jenssen eventually adds to the mix is another killer, as the song comes alive with nocturnal bird songs and Chesser observes that they make a “lonesome sound like the end of the world,” then asks “are you a-feared of the end of the world?” Fittingly, Jenssen’s synth motif features a subtly nerve-jangling howl that endlessly repeats, which gives that otherwise innocent question a haunting sense of looming dread.

The remaining pieces are a bit of a mixed bag, though the closer is a pretty solid reprise of “The Way of Time” with a squelchy new synth motif added. There are plenty of great ideas that don’t fully blossom into great songs, however, as I liked the way the phrase “The time of man” was used as a melodic hook in the opener and the gorgeous ambient fade-out of “All The Stars Have Names” is wonderful as well (it anomalously sounds like Orb-style ‘90s pop techno before that point).

Honestly, however, the near-misses don’t really matter much with this album, as the twin highlights are more than enough to make this album a powerful and memorably heavy artistic statement. Jenssen’s brilliant use of radio play samples sounds like nothing less than an urgent warning beamed a hundred years forward into a future that has already missed its chance to correct its path. I don’t want to romanticize rural poverty and desperation, but it definitely seems like humanity has only enslaved itself further over the last century (though our our travel and entertainment options have certainly improved immensely).

Music aside, it was genuinely a deeply intense and unsettling experience to be reminded that humans have largely abandoned tight-knit communities and the beauty and wonder of the natural world for an inescapable dehumanized dystopia of meaningless jobs, shallow connections, greed, pointless wars, xenophobic cruelty, endless surveillance, and the relentless ascent of unwanted artificial intelligence. I am going to be thinking about this album for a long time, as The Way of Time is a seismic psychological depth charge disguised as a cool synth album.

Listen here.

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Holy Tongue Meets Shackleton, “The Tumbling Psychic Joy of Now” (AD93, 2024)

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Unsurprisingly, I have been following Holy Tongue since the project first surfaced with their killer self-titled EP back in 2020, as few things could more obviously be more right up my alley than a dub project from one of the most reliably fascinating drummers on the planet right now (Valentina Magaletti).  While I have certainly enjoyed the project’s entire discography thus far, my experience has been that there are plenty of times when Holy Tongue has sounded exactly like what I would expect from a Magaletti-centric dub project (a stripped-down, post-punk-influenced On-U Sound homage), but those pieces are sometimes interspersed with transcendent flashes of inspiration that feel like something considerably more adventurous and unique.  Notably, those left-field moments of brilliance started to appear a bit more frequently once the other half of Vanishing Twin’s rhythm section (bassist Susumu Mukai) joined the fold.  In keeping with that theme, the addition of yet another talented collaborator (Sam Shackleton) has triggered yet another sizable creative leap forward, as The Tumbling Psychic Joy of Now is legitimately impressive enough to back up the wildly bold promise of its title (an Ornette Coleman-level feat if I ever saw one).

This particular dream collaboration began exactly the same way as many other dream collaborations before it: Holy Tongue and Shackleton shared a bill at a festival and their mutual admiration led to plans to work together.  In this case, the original idea was for Shackleton to remix an existing Holy Tongue song, but the scope happily blossomed into something much more interesting: Magaletti, Mukai, and Al Wootton recorded a bunch of raw new Holy Tongue material, handed it off to Shackleton, and gave him free rein to go hog wild with it.  Speaking as someone who was absolutely mesmerized by Shackleton’s recent collaboration with Six Organs of Admittance, I can confidently say that “let Shackleton go absolutely bananas” tends to be a winning strategy and Tumbling Psychic Joy adds another instant classic to the pre-existing pile of supporting evidence.  

That said, it did take me a handful of listens to fully grasp the visionary depth of this album, as I was initially frustrated by the shapeshifting nature of the beats and grooves.  My early instinct was “these are just improvisations and jams that have been skillfully woven together,” as Tumbling Psychic Joy is bursting with great grooves and motifs that are never allowed to expand into a full song.  Literally every song has at least a few passages that absolutely rule, but they are all ephemeral and invariably morph into something different rather than lingering and expanding.

The most prominent example of that phenomenon is “Blessed and Bewildered,” as it deceptively opens with a swinging disco thump before Magaletti’s erratic and shapeshifting high-hat patterns quickly steer the groove into far wonkier and more serpentine terrain.  Along the way, the piece steadily accumulates subdued vibraphone melodies, smeared organ chords, warped trumpet skwonks, eerie flutes, wandering xylophone melodies, and burbling psychotropic weirdness en route to something that sounds like an improbably killer mash-up of Eva Luna-era Moonshake, Bitches Brew, and like four difference Stereolab songs filtered through Nurse With Wound-style surrealism.  Put more concisely, it is one hell of a chameleonic mindfuck and the only real constant holding it all together is Mukai’s deep, dubwise bass.  Notably, that piece is also something of a microcosm for the album as a whole, as Tumbling Psychic Joy feels like being led down a bottomless and deeply hallucinatory rabbit hole while guided only by a propulsive groove that itself is constantly transforming in character.  

Once I realized that, the ingenious construction of the album finally clicked for me and I stopped lamenting that my favorite moments did not stick around and started loving how beautifully and organically the endlessly morphing groove burrowed into fresh realms of psychotropic bliss without ever lingering in familiar or predictable terrain.  I was also struck by the sheer breadth of the various stylistic threads incorporated into Holy Tongue’s vision.  Naturally, a heavy influence from Jamaican dub runs through everything, but that bedrock is continually mutated by shades of everything from Can to space age bachelor pad music to noirish Lydia Lunch-style jazz.  For example, “The Merciful Lake” variously sounds like a field recording from a remote Tibetan temple, a sinuous contemporary espionage film soundtrack, and a very weird and proggy giallo soundtrack and it still finds room for a very cool and dubwise “spring reverb” interlude along the way.  Elsewhere, the closing “Gravity Will Fail Us” incorporates a welcome Les Baxter-style exotica influence and evokes something that alternately lands between “Vicki Bennett teams up with a reggaeton/dembow producer” and “Sam Shackleton gets a DJ gig at a tiki bar.”  

I could go into raptures about some of the wonderful individual sounds as well (trippy autoharp strums, loops that unpredictably slow, speed up, and pitch shift), but it makes more sense to just say that this whole fucking album is wonderfully immersive, deeply psychedelic, and vividly and vibrantly produced from start to finish.  Given how much I dig the previous work of everyone involved, it was virtually inevitable that The Tumbling Psychic Joy of Now would delight me, but I was still taken aback by much this album shot past my highest expectations.  This is an absolutely stellar headphone album and easily one of the strongest releases in the discography of absolutely everyone involved.  

Listen here.

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Biosphere, “Angel’s Flight” (AD93, 2021)

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I believe I have been listening to Biosphere for at least 20 years now, but the project’s evolution over the last five years or so has been especially fascinating, as Geir Jenssen’s creative restlessness has led him to release one surprise after another. To my ears, 2016’s Departed Glories remains the high water mark of this adventurous phase, but I am delighted that Jenssen seems to be actively looking for new challenges and that the results are almost invariably enjoyable and distinctive. 

This latest release continues that trajectory of endlessly breaking new ground, as the bulk of Angel’s Flight was composed for a Norwegian dance production entitled Uncoordinated Dog. More significantly, all twelve pieces were crafted from repurposed fragments of Beethoven’s “String Quartet No. 14.” Unsurprisingly, much of the album would be unrecognizable to Beethoven, as Jenssen does an admirable job of blurring, stretching, blackening, and chopping his source material into a compellingly hallucinatory neo-classical fever dream.

The album instantly descends into darkly phantasmagoric territory with “The Sudden Rush,” which conjures a sinister-sounding impressionist swirl of blurred and uneasily harmonizing orchestral fragments. To some degree, that is the tone for the entire album: a series of variations upon the theme of smeared and slowed strings bleeding together and queasily undulating. Both the mood and structure of the individual pieces can vary quite a bit, however. 

Most of my favorite moments fall in the middle of the album, like the oscillating, slow-motion chord progression of “As Weird as the Elfin Lights” or the dreamlike flutes and viscerally throbbing pulse of the title piece. That said, the album probably reaches its zenith with the stuttering and gnarled closer “The Clock and Dial,” which calls to mind several orchestral loops being played at once through a blown-out bass amp. 

Jenssen treats the hapless Beethoven similarly violently in the heaving “Unclouded Splendor,” which achieves an almost operatic intensity from erratically timed and overlapping slashes of strings. There are a number of other fine pieces throughout the album as well, many which call to mind a reincarnated Debussy with a penchant for loops, a newfound love of dissonance and tension, and access to contemporary production software. 

Or maybe they simply resemble Beethoven as re-envisioned by The Caretaker, albeit considerably more vivid and robust than that sounds. Angel’s Flight is not a stroll through the ruins of a haunted and moldering memory ballroom so much as a lush, enveloping, and oft-poignant symphony in which the fabric of reality frays and bulges as time ceases to be predictably linear. Needless to say, that is quite an appealingly disorienting and immersive illusion to linger in. I certainly did not expect Biosphere to ever sound like this, but I am delighted that Jenssen’s muse led him to such wonderfully unfamiliar territory.

Samples can be found here.