Biosphere

Geir Jenssen of Biosphere comes from Tromsø, Norway, positioned 500 miles north of the Arctic Circle. He helped form the Norwegian trio Bel Canto and appeared on two albums for Belgium’s Crammed label before leaving to pursue solo work, first under the name Bleep and later as Biosphere. Several Bleep singles surfaced on Crammed’s SSR subsidiary through the late ’90s, together with the 1990 full-length The North Pole by Submarine, widely viewed as an early forerunner of ambient techno. That style merged compositional ideas drawn from environmental experimentalists such as Brian Eno, Jon Hassell, and Walter Carlos with the rhythmic drive of urban dance forms like techno and acid house, its reach expanding through artists including the KLF, Irresistible Force, Higher Intelligence Agency, and Biosphere.

Jenssen’s initial Biosphere album, Microgravity, emerged in 1991 on Norway’s Origo Sound and received an international release the next year on Apollo, an R&S subsidiary. In 1993 he supplied music for the Norwegian film Evige Stjerner (Eternal Stars) and a multimedia installation while also joining German ambient composer Pete Namlook on the Fax album The Fires of Ork, reissued by Apollo in 1994. Biosphere’s second album, Patashnik, followed in 1994, and the ensuing live tour placed one track, “Novelty Waves,” in a Levi’s commercial. A 1995 collaboration with Higher Intelligence Agency’s Bobby Bird produced the live improvisational work Polar Sequences, issued by Apollo in 1996. Substrata, Biosphere’s first entirely ambient album, appeared on All Saints Records in 1997 and soon gained recognition as a genre classic, while the Insomnia soundtrack also surfaced that year. In 1998 Jenssen and Deathprod (Norwegian engineer/musician Helge Sten) reinterpreted compositions by Arne Nordheim; the results, Nordheim Transformed, came out on Rune Grammofon.

Entering the 2000s, Jenssen issued Birmingham Frequencies, another live recording made with Higher Intelligence Agency. He then began a sustained run of Touch releases with Cirque (2000), followed by Substrata 2/Man with a Movie Camera (2001), pairing a remastered Substrata with his soundtrack to a Russian silent film created in tandem with Per Martinsen (Mental Overdrive). Later albums included the Debussy-inspired Shenzhou (2002), the minimalist drone Autour de la Lune (2004), the slightly jazzy Dropsonde (2006), and the live set Wireless (2009). N-Plants, a concept album centered on Japanese nuclear power plants, arrived on Touch in 2011. Most subsequent releases during the decade were archival or reissues on his own Biophon Records, yet he returned to Touch in 2015 for Stator, another split album with Deathprod. Biosphere moved to Smalltown Supersound in 2016, issuing Departed Glories, his debut for the label, in September. The 2017 mini-album The Petrified Forest took its inspiration from the 1936 film of the same name.