Biosphere album name references
marcus • May 23rd, 2007
An interesting compilation to what the album names of ambient musician Biosphere (Geir Jenssen) refer.
All Biosphere names allude to the cold environments of space or ice, and their exploration:
The Biosphere 2 project intended to explore the possible use of an artificial biosphere (a closed ecosystem) for space colonization. The Russian Biosphere 3 too. Both are detached, self-sufficient environments, like a space ship or a submarine.
The North Pole explored by a submarine, which may be lost like a ship in space.
Microgravity is the imperfect state of weightlessness in a space ship.
The word “patashnik” is allegedly Russian cosmonaut slang for “a traveler” or “a goner”, a cosmonaut who didn’t return from a space mission because his security cable disengaged and he was lost in space.
Substrata is, among others, a glaciology term (always plural) for the nature of a glacier’s bed. Phonetically, it’s also the Russian word for “frozen ground” (the permafrost).
A cirque is an amphitheatre-like valley formed by glacial erosion. It also refers to the death of Chris McCandless, a sort of “patashnik” who explored self-sufficient survival in a cirque in Alaska and lost himself.
Shenzhou refers to the Chinese Shenzhou spacecraft.
Autour de la Lune (1870, Round the Moon) was Jules Verne’s followup to De la Terre à la Lune (1865, From the Earth to the Moon). The first one dealt with the Earth part of the story until the ship’s launching, from the outside. Autour de la Lune dealt from the inside of the ship with the launching and the actual space travel to and around the moon [2]. The album’s titles are French for “Translatory”, “Rotatory”, “Modified”, “Vibratory”, “Deviation”, “Rotary”, “Disappeared”, “Reverse”, “Falling”.
A dropsonde is a device designed to be dropped at altitude to collect data as the device falls to the ground – in this context, it’s a sonde sent through space to another planet, it’s another “patashnik” explorator intended to be lost.