Biosphere
Shenzhou
Beatservice/Touch/Biophon Records

Assembled from looping scratches of his old red-label Claude Debussy records, Geir Jenssen, in isolation up in Tromsø, Norway, has also spent considerable time swimming with his own heartbeat dans La Mer frigide. The warm crackling analogs of that vinyl have surely wrapped themselves around his small white shape here, the oboes and strings curling in as well, as loose sheets of paper might in feeding the diminutive interior campfire that must somehow fend off the ever-burgeoning deep blue chill of the waters surrounding.

How he keeps the spaciously strewn embers glowing even as they plunge so deep into the Arctic Ocean is amazing in and of itself, warming the waters as it sinks further and further into iced, unknown depths of the dark, pressurized body. Small bubbles of oxygen stately stream toward the surface in tiny release. Jenssen's flares burn hazy, heavenly paths through the darkness, fallout from the spaced, frozen stars as above, so the unfathomable below. The bass resonates, smoldering like a phosphorescent jellyfish between the woodwind timbers of sunken ships so black and stark near the ocean floor, with thin slivers of fish circling through their barnacled bones. Beacons get lost, grateful for the deep sleep approaching. Submerged lights, fibrillations of both wave and swimming particles, are emitted from the deepest, most chillingly remote blackness.

This glows the entire trajectory down, illuming the furthest boundaries of the listening body's extremities, providing a guiding light even in the most frigid of isolation tanks.

Copyright © 2002 Andy Beta