Biosphere is Geir Jensen, a unique techno artist who is spearheading Norway's current improv/electroacoustic/electronica revolution - a revolution that makes it the most interesting musical country on the planet right now. `Cirque' is the best of four groundbreaking Biosphere records. Like Autechre's, this is a deliberately, expressively distressed music. Precision structures billow at you numbed by Arctic cold which blurs and quietens them. The pieces are like geometric ice formations muffled by snowdrifts. Bass tracks boom like hidden substrata; melodies emerge anaesthetised. There's a sense of longed-for warmth and comfort. Like Polar weather, sunlight briefly appears, and just as suddenly disappears, in `Too Fragile to Walk On'. Mossy lifeforms bloom in `Nook and Cranny' before the music darkens again. The Biosphere aesthetic is unique and completely original, like Tarkovsky in sound, inducing nostalgia, a need to return to something lost, but which can never be found: in `Black Lamb and Grey Falcon', Sinatra goes for another take, only to find the chords the pianist is hitting keep transmuting into glacial electroacoustics.`Cirque' is a major achievement in techno; 2000's best, most original release in the genre. It has a commercial, softly beat-driven sheen, but behind this, the material is as distantly silent, awesome and elemental as an avalanche; and as endlessly fascinating. Essential. Here the last copy of the original first version on the Touch label.
