In early February, Biosphere's Geir Jenssen made an album inspired by the architecture and potential instability of Japan's nuclear power plants. A month later, a huge earthquake and tsunami caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. It's healthy to be skeptical about such claims to prescience, but dissembling isn't Jenssen's style: Clearly stated intentions and ideas are a defining feature of the Norwegian ambient-house producer's decades-long career. Plus, N-Plants' sleek contours and foreboding atmosphere easily bear out his theme. Having noted the eerie coincidence, we can dispense with it and let the best Biosphere album since 1997's definitive Substrata stand on its own.
Widely regarded as an ambient milestone, Substrata represented a thoughtful dilettante hitting the reset switch. A period of fertile miscellany followed, from the processed Debussy loops of Shenzhou to the long-tone sci-fi marathon Autour de la Lune. Like Substrata, N-Plants is both a consummation and a palate-cleanser. Fully in ambient-house mode, Jenssen fashions together hazy drones, filtered synthesizers, microhouse percussion, and haunting vocal samples over classically plumb lines. Like Kate Simko's 2009 soundtrack for The Atom Smashers, the album can evoke particles of energy swarming through elegant, hulking metal curves. But this one-time archaeology student has never given up his field's patient curiosity and long view, and N-Plants can't be fully constrained by modern context. Ages of ice and stone drift through it, and the Arctic Circle is a looming presence.
Each process on N-Plants, be it a glinting synthesizer motif or a low-scudding bass line, logically catalyzes the next. Where Substrata delved deeper and deeper, N-Plants glides over level, endlessly scrolling surfaces. The tracks don't essentially change. At most, they metastasize, as on "Sendai-1", where a synthesizer plays iridescently through an aquatic atmosphere; at minimum, cycles of loops perpetually revolve, as on "Genkai-1". Either way, blissful hypnosis ensues. N-Plants is a master craftsman's reaffirmation of a fundamental but lapsed tenet of electronic ambient: You set up a conversation between the machines, and then you step out of the way.
