Biosystems: The Biosphere Remixes

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Give it up for Geir Jenssen. Who else - short of the President of the United Nations - could have assembled trendy pop-stars James, Industrial icons Front Line Assembly and Download, sassy Massive Attack hanger-on Nicolette and Norway's producer elite (Motion Control, Mind Over MIDI, Illumination, AlanOa) under a single canopy without provoking a melee of clashing styles and flying fists? Leave it to Jenssen, the king of chill (as in "brrrrrrrr!"), and a seasoned stylist whose experience within musical environments ranging from femme-voxed sugarpop to foggy null-G ambience has made him an ideal mediator, as this collection of remixes attests. You might expect the [x]+ Biosphere reaction to have the effect of contact with liquid nitrogen, tissue instantly rendered white and friable, warm blood crystallized, machines frosted into inertia. Wherever preexisting circuitry gleams naked and silvery, yes, Jenssen freezes the works over and etches his own schematic into the superficial ice. After four Biosphere albums, his melodic and rhythmic fingerprint is unmistakable. Layering such transparent overlays atop Download's "Attalal," FLA's "Circuitry," Mind Over MIDI's "It's Gonna Be Alright" and Motion Control's "Digits 3" (in which Jenssen had a hand in carving out the original piece's contorted, Maurizio-like techno/dub hollows) and assimilates these pieces into the Biosphere canon, branding them as ARTISTIC PROPERTY OF G. JENSSEN as surely as any legal writ. But Nicolette's smoldering sensuality melts the ice so that it drips from "No Government [In The Biosphere]" like cold sweat. So does the shudderingly soulful voice bubbling up from the hyperborean Deep-House depths of Illumination's "Hope To God." And, while the cold wind doth blow through the "Biosphere Trekking Mix" of AlanOa's "L'eglise [DeuxiEeme Partie]," frostbite is of little concern. Think igloo rather than glacier. Jazzy little riffs burn ardently beneath the floe, licking like flames at an Eskimo hearth. James' "She's A Star" receives Jenssen's most startling and intuitive treatment. The "Andrea's Biosphere Mix" works as a rare example of the Biosphere Touch in reverse - the audience and all band members (save the accordionist and bassist) frozen instead of the music - and as an atmosphere sympathetic to the music's lyrical sentiments. Tim Booth's asides ("whenever her face is frozen / unable to fake it anymore / ... she builds up a wall / she knows where to hide in the dark") echo off the human statuary, deflected into the nether reaches of frustrated conversation. Sad, lonely music for disconnected lovers. The curtain rises on Booth singing his heart out for only the crickets and the man weaving in and out of the littered aisles of folding chairs with his broom. Cut. Fade to white. Print.