- The revered ambient composer shifts gears to '70s style synth work on a relatively simple, yet wonderfully executed album.
- Geir Jenssen's catalogue practically demands a deep dive. His Biosphere project will likely forever be best-known for 1997's Substrata, but if you weren't paying attention, perhaps you missed the album of alternate Substrata versions from earlier this year, some of which are arguably superior to the originals. Or the reissue of Autour de la Lune, which expands one of his darkest and most austere albums with over an hour of bonus material. That's not to mention all the enjoyable low-stakes projects he's slipped through the cracks between his "proper" albums over the years, from byzantine experiments in sampling to the Rosetta Stone of his catalog, Cho Oyu 8201m: Field Recordings from Tibet, which documents the passion for mountain-climbing that informs the icy, magisterial tone of his music—and perhaps his ongoing craving for a fresh challenge.
Inland Delta is the latest of these low-key Biosphere releases, and it finds him tackling a new style: vintage ‘70s synth music. Florian Fricke's panflute-heavy score to Werner Herzog's Aguirre gets a shout-out on "Florian's Flute," while "Franklin's Dream" feels like a second cousin of Brian Eno's Ambient series. Last year's Shortwave Memories was also composed with vintage synths, but while that was a densely layered and drum-heavy record, Inland Delta is just Jenssen improvising on his synths with minimal overdubbing.
40 years of playing keyboard has paid off for the 61 year-old Jenssen. Rather than ruminating on simple chord progressions, he brings the same spiky approach to his improvisations that made his melodies on Shortwave Memories and 2011's N-Plants so distinctive. Even without any drums or bass, "Wolfgang's Wave" is so unmistakably attuned to Jenssen's style—his love of sudden octave leaps, his almost baroque pop chord progressions—that it'd sound familiar even to someone who'd only heard the first half of N-Plants. "The String Thing" isolates the creepy synth orchestras that undergirded Shortwave Memories, while "Brownian Motion" indulges his penchant for wine-dark electric piano presets, shown off wonderfully on The Senja Recordings.
Jenssen is working in a conservative style of ambient here, and he's not alone. Interest in ‘70s synth music is high thanks to reissues of records like Mort Garson's Plantasia and Ernest Hood's Neighborhoods. Artists like Green-House or Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith fold the whole daffy spirit of the ‘70s into their music, where soothing synth tones and deep vibrations had the potential to heal the listener physically and spiritually. Jenssen's approach is more self-contained. He wants, just as he did on Substrata, Cirque and Dropsonde to capture just a sliver of the exhilaration he feels while standing on top of a mountain and watching the world unfold beneath him for miles and miles.
Perhaps by its very nature, Inland Delta is a less tactile evocation of that feeling than Cho Oyu or cavernous Substrata tracks like "Chukhung" and "Kobresia." But its simplicity has its own appeal. Without a glut of instruments working in unison to evoke the grandeur of the Himalayas or the Arctic, the mind compensates for the stripped-down scale by filling in the blanks, as if looking at a photo of a far-off and obscure place and dreaming of travelling there. Every note of this album captures not only the vast mountainous vistas Jenssen loves, but also the romantic and puckish personality of one of electronic music's most unpredictable producers.
Tracklist01. Surface Tension
02. Delta Function
03. Franklin's Dream
04. Wolfgang's Wave
05. Brownian Motion
06. Random Walk
07. The String Thing
08. Florian's Flute
09. Jane's Lament