murmurations

[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, ...

Brian Eno's 1982 album Ambient 4: On Land stands as a landmark piece of ambient music, probably the most accomplished of the four works comprising Eno's ambient series. An equally-accomplished ambient work came out fifteen years later: Substrata by Geir Jenssen under his Biosphere moniker. What's interesting in considering these two albums side-by-side is that while both espouse a relationship with some notion of landscape or environment, they each do so in very different ways despite their shared genre labelling, leading to different effects on listening. One revealing approach to these different relationships is via the albums' respective portrayals of human interaction with its environment. How is the figure of 'the human' represented in each album's landscapes? How is the interaction between person & environment understood in each? And how does this shape our listening experience? Eno is the more explicit of the two artists in his intentions ...