Restless: Biosphere's 'Insomnia'
[Part of a series on sleeplessness in music - see part 1]
If Dasha Rush's 'Sleepstep' revels in the floating temporality of a sleepless night, Geir Jenssen conjures up a more unsettling atmosphere in another insomniac album, made nearly twenty years earlier. Fans of Jenssen's work under the name Biosphere might be less familiar with 'Insomnia', written as the soundtrack for the 1997 Erik Skjoldbjærg film of the same name. It was originally released in Norway and hasn't turned up in Jenssen's ongoing re-issuing of his back catalogue (although it was re-issued on CD in 2007). Yet it came out at a critical moment in Biosphere's career, appearing the same year as his now-celebrated 'Substrata'. And like that album, the soundtrack is awash in heavy reverbs of scrapes and drones, and in punctuations of silence, with sounds allowed to echo and recede into the distance, falling down towards open emptiness.
Being a film soundtrack, however, 'Insomnia' largely does not offer elongated glacial ambiance. Most of the seventeen tracks are fairly short, only two or three minutes. This makes for a different experience than 'Sleepstep'. The latter album gives tracks the space to gradually lull listeners into its night-time mood of entrancing wakefulness. Here, there is no such opportunity. But beyond length, Jenssen's record is different in that it expresses sleeplessness as something that makes you unsteady on your feet, that marks a loss of a habitable rhythm, induces a feeling that time is starting to play tricks on you. This record follows the insomniac from night to day and back again, as lack of sleep slowly wears you down. These short tracks only need a minute or two to make you feel that time is now stretching, now contracting, and always messing with your perception.
Separated from Skjoldbjærg's film, the record might seem to be a jumble, a mesh of musical ideas that barely last to make any impression. But the album follows the film's structure in its sequencing, and with this in mind you get a sense, listening to the record, of someone whose lack of sleep progressively makes it harder for them to keep a grip on their reality while awake.
Unlike 'Substrata', we are not in an uninhabited mountainous landscape. To follow the plot of the film, we are in the northern Norwegian city of Tromsø (Jenssen's home town), 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, accompanying two detectives sent to the city to investigate the murder of a teenager. What the soundtrack does share with Biosphere's most famous work is an aesthetic down which the listener tumbles, down into the inner world of an isolated character – in this case, the film's detective protagonist, through whose eyes we see events unfold. And it is here that the film's title come into play. Stellan Skarsgard's Swedish cop cannot adjust to his new surroundings: during summer, the sun stays visible through midnight; that, plus the long twilight at such high altitude, means it never gets dark. The protagonist's nights are enveloped in an increasingly-blinding white light. Part of the film's interest, however, lies in the uncertainty of the central theme: it's not clear if Skarsgard's insomnia is due to that light, or if the unending brightness mirrors a deeper problem, a surfacing guilt from which the central character can no longer escape. As Kevin Yeoman puts it, “Engström is essentially trapped in a place without shadow, where there is nowhere – literally or figuratively – for him to hide”.
With the title and the film's plot in mind, Jenssen's record feels like the soundtrack of a person losing track of time, of its cycles and regularity, as this white light seeps into everything that surrounds them. That light is experienced sonically at first as a wash of dense tones: opener 'Proem' presents a fog of busling drones enveloping the perceptual field, like the light covering the Tromsø landscape. Similarly, the more plaintive voices of 'Lounge' are soon covered up in sharp repetitions of steel shards, louder and clearer in the mix, and around which everything else loses focus. But there are nonetheless clear rhythms grounding these pieces, bass notes and clicks keeping regular time.
This changes when we get to 'Field'. The track accompanies a scene where Detectives Engström and Vik corner the suspected killer, only to find he has escaped through a hidden tunnel into a fog-enveloped scree. Here we are confronted with long sections of silence, as synth notes pop and echo down an imagined well. Then there is the throbbing hum of a chopped synth wave keeping time, its slightness emphasising the emptiness around it. The experience of this hum after the lush drones of previous tracks is almost akin to tinnitus. There is a sense of isolation, of being caught in your own head, listening to your body's rhythm as you register just how little is now sounding. Soon the synth drops return and reflect that emptiness back at us through their long echoes, stones being dropped down the well. The dissonance of these notes, and of a warped brassy loop behind them, heralds an ominous key change. Suddenly there is a snap-crackle of an unwieldy, snatched piece of percussion. These cracks presages a drum beat that never comes – instead, the flicker of percussion appears and disappears, its off-kilter rhythm never resolved. There is no clear beat, only a spaced-out regularity, like matches periodically lit and flitted away. Time passes, but its rhythm is breaking down, its movement harder to keep track of. In the film, Engström careers wildly around an impenetrable fog, catching movements that might be a person but cannot be fixed. The percussive noises that dance around Jenssen's drones seem also to be playing tricks with Engström in that fog.
As Engström is forced to deal with the repurcussions of that rush through the fog (I won't give away the plot), the soundtrack's music achieves a kind of stasis, but one that is marked with whirls of looped unease, as different noises try to break out of the endless daylight and push time forward, but can only follow their own tails. In the record's middle tracks, dissonant musical elements will suddenly snap into focus, like the backwards piano in 'Shade', reflecting a different frequency range from the sludgy drones underneath, before receding into the sonic murk. The experience feels like that of the insomniac who has now gone days without sleep and is beginning to catch tricks of the light. Appropriately, in Jenssen's soundtrack, the notion of hearing things is more pronounced than in 'Sleepstep'. That album adopted a more pensive attitude towards its wakefulness, wrapping the endless night around itself through long unchanging rhythms, slowly accepting the night's infinitude. Here, by contrast, there is no peace: semblences of rhythm are interrupted by jarring samples and musical loops, whose dissonances rupture your perception of the other sounds as harmonically grounding these tracks.
Shifts in frequency range are also key. Tracks like 'Chamber', whose background field recording-style hiss is coupled with trembling buzzes of electricity that fade in and out, evoke an outer world and an inner one. The shift from higher EQ fizzes to lower buzzes, punctuated by silence, give the impression of falling in and out of consciousness, that the world is going in and out of focus. Silence in these tracks mimics the blankness of the light that the film emphasises in interior shots; just as notes and noises fall away into emptiness, so the windows of buildings reveal nothing of the outside world, only an impenetrable white.
As our field of hearing sways back and forth between different sounds, and we think of Engström walking through the daytime in a daze, we enter the mind of a person who cannot keep steady, cannot see straight, who is slowly falling in on themselves. Elsewhere, as Engström struggles to continue his work, time moves sluggishly around him, tripping over itself, as in the duplet vibraphone notes that fall off-sync with the tinnitus beat of 'Transit'. The endless daylight and lack of sleep is getting to us.
What makes the use of the music throughout the film interesting is that, for all the music's evocation of fraught psychology, the film is starkly opaque as to Engström's thoughts and motivations. The reason for his besmirched reputation back in Sweden is described but not exactly explained. After the brief encounter with the suspected killer, why Engström does what he does, and the lengths to which he goes to maintain his lie, can be pieced together semi-plausibly. But Sarsgard's face and words give little away as to whether his character knows quite what he's doing, or whether he thinks he can justify it.
Jenssen's music is actually sparingly used throughout the film, but crucially appears during moments when Engström is trying in vain to get to sleep – the blinding light seeping through the duvet he places over the window – and his mind rakes over the events he took part in again and again, showing us perspectives that might be invented, actions that are in one moment clear, in the next inscrutable. By projecting such a sparse sense of rhythm, enveloped in drawn-out silences, tracks such as 'Visit' give presence to the insomniac time. They emphasises that for those who cannot sleep, time slows down and stops, there in the space of the hotel room with nothing but piercing light outside, leaving the protagonist to wait out the white night along with the ghosts that visit him.
Similarly, the music rises in moments when it is unclear whether what we're seeing on screen is actually happening, whether we're seeing the real sequence of events or a character's imaginings. Music appears in one scene where Engström searches a flat and whirling camera motions give the impression that there is more than one of him wandering the apartment. Minutes are skipped over without any clear cuts in the camera's presence within the scene. Again, time is becoming uncontrollable, filtered through a sleep-addled mind that cannot keep track.
There is no acceptance here of the night's vastness through one's sleepless state, as in 'Sleepstep'. Night and day have merged into one continuous sunbeam. Instead, there is only a sense of being slowly worn down, so that by the film's end, and the record's last tracks, regular beats seem to have disappeared entirely, and what is left is a formlessness, reflecting the ever-bolder white light that fills all doors and windows. Field recordings, or even looping noises, are also gone, as silence takes up more and more sonic space, along with piercing shards of high-frequency peals and crashes of industrial hoots, as on 'Quay', which accompanies the film's climax. We sway on whirling synth drones, cut off from any even-paced and continuous repetitions – only scratches and clatters remain, falling in and out of our field of hearing. And then finally, as the film's plot resolves, the track 'Tunnel' introduces a regular and continuous rhythm. The possibility of sleep has returned – although whether this sleep will be undisturbed is another question.
Jenssen's soundtrack gives us the experience of the inconsolable insomniac, through music whose sense of time-keeping slowly crumbles under the weight of hallucinatory noises and stretches of immovable silence. 'Insomnia' reflects the side of prolonged sleeplessness that cannot deal with the depth of the night any more than the demands of the day. The film adds an extra element to this experience by merging day and night together, and by giving us a main character whose exhausted conscience filters into his surroundings, providing us with ghosts and repeated events, and strange tricks of the light, that only push sleep further away. 'He who sins, does not sleep', the film's tagline tells us.
While many of the tracks are much shorter than those on other Biosphere albums, this is a record to seek out for those who love Jenssen's work. It's grown on me over the years, as has the film; both have a blanched surface whose subtle shifts hint at complexities underneath. And just as the film draws on sound to help us experience its protagonist's endless wakefulness, so the soundtrack gives us the time of the insomniac using Skjoldbjærg's narrative. Like Engström and his nocturnal visions, the music can conjure up images and psychologies from the film which add to the soundscape. Stay up through the night with one, and you may find yourself staying up with the other.
Being a film soundtrack, however, 'Insomnia' largely does not offer elongated glacial ambiance. Most of the seventeen tracks are fairly short, only two or three minutes. This makes for a different experience than 'Sleepstep'. The latter album gives tracks the space to gradually lull listeners into its night-time mood of entrancing wakefulness. Here, there is no such opportunity. But beyond length, Jenssen's record is different in that it expresses sleeplessness as something that makes you unsteady on your feet, that marks a loss of a habitable rhythm, induces a feeling that time is starting to play tricks on you. This record follows the insomniac from night to day and back again, as lack of sleep slowly wears you down. These short tracks only need a minute or two to make you feel that time is now stretching, now contracting, and always messing with your perception.
Separated from Skjoldbjærg's film, the record might seem to be a jumble, a mesh of musical ideas that barely last to make any impression. But the album follows the film's structure in its sequencing, and with this in mind you get a sense, listening to the record, of someone whose lack of sleep progressively makes it harder for them to keep a grip on their reality while awake.
Unlike 'Substrata', we are not in an uninhabited mountainous landscape. To follow the plot of the film, we are in the northern Norwegian city of Tromsø (Jenssen's home town), 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, accompanying two detectives sent to the city to investigate the murder of a teenager. What the soundtrack does share with Biosphere's most famous work is an aesthetic down which the listener tumbles, down into the inner world of an isolated character – in this case, the film's detective protagonist, through whose eyes we see events unfold. And it is here that the film's title come into play. Stellan Skarsgard's Swedish cop cannot adjust to his new surroundings: during summer, the sun stays visible through midnight; that, plus the long twilight at such high altitude, means it never gets dark. The protagonist's nights are enveloped in an increasingly-blinding white light. Part of the film's interest, however, lies in the uncertainty of the central theme: it's not clear if Skarsgard's insomnia is due to that light, or if the unending brightness mirrors a deeper problem, a surfacing guilt from which the central character can no longer escape. As Kevin Yeoman puts it, “Engström is essentially trapped in a place without shadow, where there is nowhere – literally or figuratively – for him to hide”.
With the title and the film's plot in mind, Jenssen's record feels like the soundtrack of a person losing track of time, of its cycles and regularity, as this white light seeps into everything that surrounds them. That light is experienced sonically at first as a wash of dense tones: opener 'Proem' presents a fog of busling drones enveloping the perceptual field, like the light covering the Tromsø landscape. Similarly, the more plaintive voices of 'Lounge' are soon covered up in sharp repetitions of steel shards, louder and clearer in the mix, and around which everything else loses focus. But there are nonetheless clear rhythms grounding these pieces, bass notes and clicks keeping regular time.
This changes when we get to 'Field'. The track accompanies a scene where Detectives Engström and Vik corner the suspected killer, only to find he has escaped through a hidden tunnel into a fog-enveloped scree. Here we are confronted with long sections of silence, as synth notes pop and echo down an imagined well. Then there is the throbbing hum of a chopped synth wave keeping time, its slightness emphasising the emptiness around it. The experience of this hum after the lush drones of previous tracks is almost akin to tinnitus. There is a sense of isolation, of being caught in your own head, listening to your body's rhythm as you register just how little is now sounding. Soon the synth drops return and reflect that emptiness back at us through their long echoes, stones being dropped down the well. The dissonance of these notes, and of a warped brassy loop behind them, heralds an ominous key change. Suddenly there is a snap-crackle of an unwieldy, snatched piece of percussion. These cracks presages a drum beat that never comes – instead, the flicker of percussion appears and disappears, its off-kilter rhythm never resolved. There is no clear beat, only a spaced-out regularity, like matches periodically lit and flitted away. Time passes, but its rhythm is breaking down, its movement harder to keep track of. In the film, Engström careers wildly around an impenetrable fog, catching movements that might be a person but cannot be fixed. The percussive noises that dance around Jenssen's drones seem also to be playing tricks with Engström in that fog.
As Engström is forced to deal with the repurcussions of that rush through the fog (I won't give away the plot), the soundtrack's music achieves a kind of stasis, but one that is marked with whirls of looped unease, as different noises try to break out of the endless daylight and push time forward, but can only follow their own tails. In the record's middle tracks, dissonant musical elements will suddenly snap into focus, like the backwards piano in 'Shade', reflecting a different frequency range from the sludgy drones underneath, before receding into the sonic murk. The experience feels like that of the insomniac who has now gone days without sleep and is beginning to catch tricks of the light. Appropriately, in Jenssen's soundtrack, the notion of hearing things is more pronounced than in 'Sleepstep'. That album adopted a more pensive attitude towards its wakefulness, wrapping the endless night around itself through long unchanging rhythms, slowly accepting the night's infinitude. Here, by contrast, there is no peace: semblences of rhythm are interrupted by jarring samples and musical loops, whose dissonances rupture your perception of the other sounds as harmonically grounding these tracks.
Shifts in frequency range are also key. Tracks like 'Chamber', whose background field recording-style hiss is coupled with trembling buzzes of electricity that fade in and out, evoke an outer world and an inner one. The shift from higher EQ fizzes to lower buzzes, punctuated by silence, give the impression of falling in and out of consciousness, that the world is going in and out of focus. Silence in these tracks mimics the blankness of the light that the film emphasises in interior shots; just as notes and noises fall away into emptiness, so the windows of buildings reveal nothing of the outside world, only an impenetrable white.
What makes the use of the music throughout the film interesting is that, for all the music's evocation of fraught psychology, the film is starkly opaque as to Engström's thoughts and motivations. The reason for his besmirched reputation back in Sweden is described but not exactly explained. After the brief encounter with the suspected killer, why Engström does what he does, and the lengths to which he goes to maintain his lie, can be pieced together semi-plausibly. But Sarsgard's face and words give little away as to whether his character knows quite what he's doing, or whether he thinks he can justify it.
Jenssen's music is actually sparingly used throughout the film, but crucially appears during moments when Engström is trying in vain to get to sleep – the blinding light seeping through the duvet he places over the window – and his mind rakes over the events he took part in again and again, showing us perspectives that might be invented, actions that are in one moment clear, in the next inscrutable. By projecting such a sparse sense of rhythm, enveloped in drawn-out silences, tracks such as 'Visit' give presence to the insomniac time. They emphasises that for those who cannot sleep, time slows down and stops, there in the space of the hotel room with nothing but piercing light outside, leaving the protagonist to wait out the white night along with the ghosts that visit him.
There is no acceptance here of the night's vastness through one's sleepless state, as in 'Sleepstep'. Night and day have merged into one continuous sunbeam. Instead, there is only a sense of being slowly worn down, so that by the film's end, and the record's last tracks, regular beats seem to have disappeared entirely, and what is left is a formlessness, reflecting the ever-bolder white light that fills all doors and windows. Field recordings, or even looping noises, are also gone, as silence takes up more and more sonic space, along with piercing shards of high-frequency peals and crashes of industrial hoots, as on 'Quay', which accompanies the film's climax. We sway on whirling synth drones, cut off from any even-paced and continuous repetitions – only scratches and clatters remain, falling in and out of our field of hearing. And then finally, as the film's plot resolves, the track 'Tunnel' introduces a regular and continuous rhythm. The possibility of sleep has returned – although whether this sleep will be undisturbed is another question.
Jenssen's soundtrack gives us the experience of the inconsolable insomniac, through music whose sense of time-keeping slowly crumbles under the weight of hallucinatory noises and stretches of immovable silence. 'Insomnia' reflects the side of prolonged sleeplessness that cannot deal with the depth of the night any more than the demands of the day. The film adds an extra element to this experience by merging day and night together, and by giving us a main character whose exhausted conscience filters into his surroundings, providing us with ghosts and repeated events, and strange tricks of the light, that only push sleep further away. 'He who sins, does not sleep', the film's tagline tells us.
While many of the tracks are much shorter than those on other Biosphere albums, this is a record to seek out for those who love Jenssen's work. It's grown on me over the years, as has the film; both have a blanched surface whose subtle shifts hint at complexities underneath. And just as the film draws on sound to help us experience its protagonist's endless wakefulness, so the soundtrack gives us the time of the insomniac using Skjoldbjærg's narrative. Like Engström and his nocturnal visions, the music can conjure up images and psychologies from the film which add to the soundscape. Stay up through the night with one, and you may find yourself staying up with the other.
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