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Geir Jenssen

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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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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.