Microgravity

Geir Jenssen has been broadcasting from his Arctic Circle home in Tromso, Norway since 1986. His first transmissions were the celestial synth-pop ripples that carried Bel Canto. The sonar dancefloor vibrations of Bleep followed. With 1991's MICROGRAVITY, Jenssen launched his popular Biosphere project--a probe targeted at both inner and outer space.
MICROGRAVITY is something of a transitional album for Biosphere. For every "Tranquillizer", "Cygnus-A", or "Cloudwalker II"--tracks where the blend of lulling melodies, sci-fi samples, and amniotic pulses engulf your senses like embryonic cocoons--there are relentless floor-fillers like the Bleep-flavored "Baby Satellite", "Chromosphere", and "The Fairy Tale". Jenssen's knob-twiddling techno numbers are bejeweled with extraterrestrial melody, but they pale beside the sheer breathtaking beauty of his less rhythm-centric compositions. The beatless driftscapes that book-end MICROGRAVITY ("Biosphere" and "Microgravity") are compass points for the stellar ambience of SUBSTRATA (released on Brian Eno's All Saints label in 1997) and for INSOMNIA, Jenssen's evocative score for Erik Skjoldbjaerg's acclaimed Arctic police procedural of the same name. MICROGRAVITY's follow-up, PATASHNIK (1994), would refine the Biosphere balance between beat and drift, landing the album's breakbeat-propelled "Novelty Waves" in an attention-grabbing international Levi's commercial.|