Electronic Sound May 2015 (Regular Edition) | Page 26
ALBUM REVIEWS
entirely independently.
BIOSPHERE/
DEATHPROD
Stator
TOUCH
Ambient music as background? Not a bit
of it, as this well-matched split album
proves
Geir Jenssen, better known as Biosphere,
and Helge Sten, who operates under
the charming name Deathprod, are
no strangers to working together or
with other artists. They previously
collaborated on a tribute to Arne
Nordheim and both are well known for
their improvised live sessions with sundry
like-minded individuals, so they’re
clearly receptive to the challenges and
opportunities that arise from creative
alliances.
For ‘Stator’, the pair have chosen to
produce a split album, so this is only a
partnership in the loosest sense of the
word. Nevertheless, the seven tracks
here underline how fundamentally
sympatico Jenssen and Sten are, as the
pieces seem to build out of the same
elemental constructs as each other,
whether that be grainy static blocks, tiny
melodic sprinkles or urgent synth pulses.
The effect is a uniform feel, a consistent
atmosphere, even though the ideas have
come from two different minds working
Jenssen is best known for producing
electronic music that carries an Arctic
chill. No musician, with the possible
exception of Thomas Köner, has evoked
the sound of icy tundra like Jenssen,
every note and texture carrying a sort of
delicate, frozen quality that forever links
his music to that environment. Sten,
working out of units like Supersilent,
similarly fashions music that reflects a
sonic landscape, but one more akin to
the gritty, post-industrial soundworld
of The Hafler Trio. His methods include
using something he calls “Audio Virus”,
a Heath Robinson collection of old kit,
homemade electronics and sundry bits of
sound-making detritus.
‘Stator’, named after a stationary
element within rotating machinery, is an
exercise in extreme reductionism, taking
both musicians’ distinctive approach and
paring it right back. These are tracks that
exist in a fragile state of minimalism,
from the pretty timbres and carefully
controlled distortion of Biosphere’s
opening ‘Muses-C’ to Deathprod’s
harrowing static soundbed on his closing
‘Optical’. At times, the effect of all these
tracks feels like being trapped within a
vast machine, stuck to the mechanism
and hearing the engine from the point of
view of being inside rather than in the
external world.
Biosphere’s contributions are quite
subtle, quite delicate, quite melodic,
although that melody is itself reduced
to mere traces of tones or bubbling
sequences. Deathprod’s pieces are more
immediately arresting, in the sense that
they are noisy blasts, albeit discreetly
managed, full of reverb and suppressed in
the volume department. They have the
same sort of urgency that Can captured
with the detonation that opened their
seminal ‘Oh Yeah’.
Although this is an album best digested
as a linear, single work, Biosphere’s
‘Baud’ stands out for no other reason
than it sounds like a malfunctioning
transmitter pushing out bursts of data
into a barren, foggy, post-apocalyptic
wasteland. Taken as a whole, ‘Stator’
is far from the background music often
associated with the ambient genre.
This is a dynamic, many-layered suite
of tracks that deserves the listener’s
complete, undivided attention.
MAT SMITH
DEATHPROD