Featuring 12 tracks based on Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 spanning the classical-electronics divide with a blend of electronica, hauntological sonics and modern composition.
Chamber music sonorities with a sense of uneasy discord
Release of a new Biosphere album is something of an event, and Angel’s Flight, featuring 12 tracks based on Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 spanning the classical-electronics divide with a blend of electronica, hauntological sonics and modern composition, is no exception. Containing some of Geir Janssen’s most ornate work yet, it explores chamber music sonorities with a sense of uneasy discord harking back to early 20th c. composers like Stravinsky and Schoenberg, much initially composed for Ingun Bjørnsgaard Prosjekt’s Uncoordinated Dog dance production, which explored the personal, the ambiguous, exposure and beauty. The likes of “In The Ballroom” are imbued with a distinct hauntological tenor, icy strings rendered eerily beguiling by tape saturation. The feeling heightens as Flight progresses, “Faith And Reverence” and “Unclouded Splendour” extruding chamber music samples highlighting and bolding already emergent baroque and gothic qualities. The final piece sees Biosphere’s older style seeking to re-assert itself, the orchestrals dissolved by crackling electronics into beds of uneasy ambience, brought out by Stefan Betke‘s mastering.
Angel’s Flight is available on AD 93. [Bandcamp]
