Higher Intelligent Agency & Biosphere - Polar Sequences / Birmingham Frequencies (Beyond; 1996 / Headphone; 1999)
Even though Biosphere’s 1997 release Substrata shows up on a lot of lists as the greatest ambient album of all time, and he’s collaborated with a ton of reputable musicians throughout the years, I still can’t help but feel like he’s a bit under-appreciated and has routinely been overlooked as someone who’s influenced the work of a lot of other artists along the way. I could spend a whole lot of time singing the praises of albums like Cirque, Shenzhou, Autour de la Lune, and of course Substrata, but instead, I’m going to focus on his two most successful collaborations, and I’m even going to go out on a limb and say that they’re both better than any of Biosphere’s solo efforts. The two albums I’m speaking of with such reverence are Biosphere’s and Higher Intelligence Agency’s two masterstrokes, Polar Sequences andBirmingham Frequencies, which were released in 1996 and 1999, respectively. Each is a live recording taken in artists’ home regions, and both are fricken’ out of control. Polar Sequences (the slightly better of the two) was recorded in Biosphere’s home town of Tromso, Norway during live performances held on top of a mountain, where audience members were taken to by tram car. The musicians were commissioned to create a piece for Tromso’s Polar Music Festival using environmental field recordings culled from the region. Given that Tromso is situated above the Arctic Circle, the results are both beautiful and foreboding; huge, narcotic beats are saturated with the sounds of snow, ice melt, glacial cracking, and cable cars swirling in a heady pool of reverb. The razor sharp, trippy ass production makes the sounds seem as though they’re being launched over the crowd into the valleys below, and I can’t help but picture an awestruck audience just sitting there with spinning spirals where their eyeballs used to be. Birmingham Frequencies features live pieces that were performed on the 12th floor of the Rotunda, a high rise situated in the middle of Birmingham, and again, field recordings taken from the area provide the backbone for the music. The sounds are obviously a bit more urban, with everything from children splashing and chasing ducks in a park fountain to the clanking of machinery being wrapped around the beats, but they’re similarly hypnotizing to the pieces on Polar Frequencies and make for an equally surreal listening experience with a decent pair of headphones. If you’ve enjoyed the works of either Biosphere or Higher Intelligence Agency in the past, or if you’re a fan of ambient music and/or trip hoppy beats, I can’t recommend these releases more highly. If you’re new to Biosphere and don’t know where to start, still hit up Substrata first, then Cirque, and then come looking for these. —Josh Laclair // February 11, 2012
