Autour de la Lune

Biosphere's Geir Jenssen knows from cold. Residing as he does near the Arctic Circle in Norway, Jenssen understands the psychological implications of a sun that, like a lamented deadbeat parent, routinely disappears for months at a time, and the absence of that essential lifeforce takes an inevitable emotional toll that informs Jenssen's art. It's tempting to say that Biosphere's bleak music sounds as it does for the same reason countries of Norway's approximate latitude make the world's best Vodka. The vacuum of space gets pretty close to absolute zero, cold's recognised ideal, so it makes sense that the conceptually minded Jenssen sets albums there.

His latest trip into the beyond started when French radio commissioned Jenssen to create a piece using their archives. He selected sounds from a radio dramatisation of Jules Verne's space travel story De la Terre à la Lune ("From the Earth to the Moon") and pulled additional material from recordings made at the MIR space station, then combined the fragments with his own new music. The result is Autour de la Lune, a single 74-minute piece in nine movements. The samples are used sparingly throughout, and the beat-driven side of Biosphere is completely absent. Mostly, the record is a showcase for long and impossibly deep drones. The 21-minute opener "Translation" is an exception here, as a cluster of midrange notes that braid to form a definite melody. Rather than referencing found sound or environmental recordings, "Translation" seems inspired by film music, with tense throbs and horn-like synth lines that suggest captured images of a spacecraft leisurely moving in front of stars.