Biosphere

In the history of electronic music, few records have been as underrated as “Microgravity”. Even within Biosphere's own discography, “Substrata” (1997) is far more celebrated. It's even hard to find articles about “Microgravity”: online, Allmusic stands out, awarding it five stars, though its review amounts to just three lines. Beyond that, there are only a handful of scattered blog posts, which generically describe it as a good record with sounds typical of the early Nineties - a footnote in the music of its time.

Pitchfork didn't deem it worthy of its list of best Idm (short for intelligent dance music) albums, nor did Simon Reynolds mention it in "Energy Flash". Staying closer to home, Christian Zingales completely ignores Biosphere in his guide "Electronica". And yet this album came out in the year that split electronic music into a before and an after: 1991.

That ambient could be wedded to the pulse of house and techno had already been demonstrated by a small group of names from the London underground in the last glimmers of the Eighties (the maxi-single "A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld" by Orb came out in October 1989, no less). However, a couple more years of settling were needed to go from there to the birth of a scene with an actual market, one that could compete outside the 12-inch format: time for audiences to realize that club music could also be relaxing and turn the volume down, and for producers to realize they could indulge in crafting those atmospheres, rather than just mixing Vangelis and Pink Floyd records over a drum machine.

The next step was to move away from clubs for good and bring those atmospheres into the home: that's when the aforementioned Idm was born.

In truth, looking back at that evolution today brings a good deal of confusion, as often happens when trying to historicize electronic music. Besides Idm, people talked - and still talk - about chill-out, ambient house and ambient techno.

These are all terms that flow into the electronic music of that period and occupy roughly the same geographical territory, often overlapping, but never in a fully precise way: fan debates on the subject are endless, going on for almost thirty years now, without ever being resolved, since it's essentially a matter of splitting hairs.

For example, many strictly file Aphex Twin under ambient techno and Orb under ambient house, but if you mixed their tracks together for a blind listen, how many people could actually tell which was which? If their genre classification were really so clear-cut, that would be an easy task - instead, it isn't.

Others suggest that ambient house is the music that represented the birth of this hybrid between dance and ambient, while ambient techno would be a later evolution driven by its intellectualization. But that's the exact same definition used to describe the birth of Idm - and yet electronic music fans refuse to treat these definitions as synonyms.

If, many years later, changes in music have led to situations where it's sometimes possible to draw a clear line between the various labels (there are plenty of records released after 2000 that genuinely belong to Idm but can't be considered ambient techno) - though sometimes doesn't mean always - the underlying problem remains: the further back in time you go, the harder the distinction becomes. Note that none of this has even touched on chill-out, or things would get even more complicated.

The purpose of this article isn't to claim it can rewrite the history of electronic music (which, rather than being rewritten, would need simplifying and purging of dozens of superfluous classifications), but rather to point out how, in a narrative this convoluted, one where it's so hard to agree on what represents what, important steps in the evolution of a scene can end up falling through the cracks of the story.

That's exactly what happened to "Microgravity", which according to the ambient house canon is one of the first two albums ever released (the other being the Orb's debut) and according to the ambient techno canon is actually the very first one, predating Aphex Twin's "Selected Ambient Works 85-92" by a year. Within Idm it's usually not considered at all, except that, when it does come up, it gets described through comparisons to some of the genre's founding artists, like Autechre and Black Dog, as a way of downsizing its importance (though, looking closely, those very artists actually debuted a year, if not two, later).

However you turn this confusing Rubik's cube, "Microgravity" stands there, inaugurating a new era of electronic music. Few records, heard fresh on release, could have sounded quite so alien.

Geir Jenssen was the keyboardist of Bel Canto, a synth-pop band formed in Tromsø, in northern Norway, in the mid-Eighties. After two albums with international distribution through Crammed Records, though with little success, he left them in 1990 to focus on a solo project. He thus adopted the moniker Biosphere (replacing the earlier Bleep, used in 1989-90 to produce acid house) and devoted himself to a body of work into which he poured all his passions, musical and otherwise: Detroit techno (which he promoted on Tromsø radio as a DJ), ambient, science-fiction films, astronomy. These were, after all, embraces that the culture of the time was evidently pushing towards: Jenssen got there first thanks to creativity and intuition, but like all innovators he wasn't some alien being. He lived in his own time and absorbed its inputs, making his work because at that moment both the means to get there and the need to do so existed: proof of this is that these sounds would go on to dominate at least until the mid-Nineties.

The album was initially rejected by Ssr Records, a subsidiary of Crammed, and had to settle for distribution through the small Norwegian label Origo Sound. In 1992, though, it found an international outlet through Apollo, founded that same year by label boss Renaat Vandepapeliere to accommodate this new kind of sound. Of the nine tracks on the tracklist, six are built on electronic rhythms and three are strictly ambient.

The first group includes "Baby Satellite" (punctuated by whispered voices, spacecraft beeps and hissing synthetic cymbals), "Tranquillizer" (whose deep bass seems to anticipate the dub techno of Basic Channel), "The Fairy Tale" (which samples "Wild Boys", a radio piece by Winston Tong, and "The Right Stuff", the 1983 film directed by Philip Kaufman), "Chromosphere" (among the most acidic and mechanical), "Cygnus-A" (with no kick drum, but featuring extensive timbral variation on the percussion, which seems to draw on African tribal music) and "Baby Interphase" (a reprise of "Baby Satellite", with the low frequencies pushed further forward and dialogue added from the TV series "Space 1999").

The second group instead includes "Microgravity" (a pile-up of blanket-like keyboards, slowed-down basslines and ambient noise, with one synth mimicking a guitar arpeggio), "Biosphere" (the darkest moment, thick with drones and saturated tones) and, above all, "Cloudwalker II", which sounds like a procession set in a remote future, after the human race. Its menacing atmosphere feeds on cold synth pads, minor-key melodies, tiny samples of unidentifiable cacophony, a background pattern vaguely reminiscent of a steelpan, and muffled thuds caused by who knows what, off in the distance.

It's the track that, more than any other in Biosphere's catalogue, has shaped the electronic imagination that followed. In 1993 it was included on the legendary VHS "3Lux-3", released by the German label Stud!o K7: thirteen videos made specifically for as many classics of techno, ambient, IDM and related genres, drawing on image collage, experimental animation and pioneering computer-graphics experiments. In the dedicated column you'll find the video paired with "Cloudwalker II", directed by Swiss graphic artist and animator Robert Müller.

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12/04/2021