Wireless: Live at the Arnolfini, Bristol

The Touch label releases the first solo live album by Norway's Geir Jenssen aka Biosphere. Recorded live at The Arnolfini, Bristol on October 27, 2007 by the doyen of environmental sound recordists, Chris Watson, using 2 x Sony ECM 77s with a Nagra P11 Ares flash card recorder, and from desk to hard drive. The recording was mixed, edited and mastered by Touch stalwart BJNilsen in Berlin during March of 2009.

This concert was part of Touch 25 Live, which also featured a performance of Storm (by Chris Watson and BJNilsen). This is Biosphere's sixth release for Touch. In the early 1990s, he was a pioneer of so-called "ambient techno," but since then, he has refined his sound into something more magnetic and enduring. His last album, Dropsonde, wasn't a soundtrack like the interwoven Substrata, nor an episodic journey in the way that Autour de la Lune is. It pushed new directions towards the jazz colors of Miles Davis and Jon Hassell, while re-invigorating the pulse and projection of his signature sound: a hypnotic combination of pleasure and dread. Here, Geir Jenssen takes this further, incorporating samples of field recordings by Jony Easterby and trumpet by Anders Karlskas, invoking a sparser, more arresting sound.

A landmark release for Biosphere - his first solo live album - heralding new beginnings without jettisoning the past.