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, ...