10 Friday, July 29, 2011 www.thenational.ae The National thereview The National thereview Friday, July 29, 2011 www.thenational.ae 11 this week’s essential reading ‘Rapping the revolution’ Meet El General, a 21-year-old rapper who has emerged as the hooded bard of the Arab { by Lauren E Bohn, Spring, since providing the soundtrack to the final days of Ben Ali’s regime in Tunisia music { Foreign Policy playlist The national grid: four more power-related albums, from the sublime to the obvious The Power Station Nuclear The Power Station (1985) Time to get the most literal one out of the way first. The Power Station were an Eighties supergroup mainly composed of two parts Duran Duran and one part Robert Palmer, whose slickly produced debut album turned out a couple of minor hits, including a decent cover emissions of Get It On, the T-Rex classic. Pink Floyd Animals (1977) A month before the earthquake and tsunami that triggered about Biosphere’s work is espe- Nothing says rock and roll cially abstract. quite like a disused coal-fired an atomic crisis in Japan, the ambient electronic music artist Indeed, tracks on N-Plants like Ikata-1 and Oi-1, with their skit- power station in London. Biosphere was busy capturing the beautiful but bewildering tering rhythms and formalistic Temporarily adorned with designs, play like the kind of a large inflatable animal, nature of the doomed Mihama plant, writes Andy Battaglia minimal techno much in fashion Battersea Power Station in numerous electronic-music features on the cover of When the artist known as Bio- at all, the conception of nuclear realms. Floyd’s 10th studio album, the sphere set out to make his new al- plants really figures into the al- Heard another way, however one after Wish Your Were Here bum, the story goes, he began to bum’s sound in the end. In brief – with a compelling narrative at- and before The Wall. get inspired when he happened notes tagged to the release, Jens- tached and probing questions upon an old photograph of a pic- sen wrote of his new-found fasci- asked by way of implication – Bio- turesque nuclear plant by the sea. nation with such industrial sites: sphere’s music is extremely ab- He was newly stationed in Kraków, “I wanted to make a soundtrack stract. It’s stranger than it sounds Poland, where he’d moved after to some of them, concentrating at first, and then grows ever British Sea Power spending most of his 49 years on the architecture, design and stranger as the mystery behind The Decline of cloistered in the upper reaches of localisations, but also question- its making begins to suffuse a lis- British Sea Power (2003) Norway. His setting for the winter ing the potential radiation danger tener’s interaction with it. What had changed: a grey city sighing (a cooling system being destroyed are we to make of such work? This indie rock band’s debut beneath clouds of smoke as op- N-Plants by a landslide or earthquake, etc).” What are we to make of ambient gathered a small sliver of posed to a remote town where the Biosphere That’s certainly intriguing, but electronic music in general? Does success upon its 2003 northern lights shine. Touch it’s the only even remotely specific it have anything in particular to release. It is most notable Geir Jenssen, the man known as statement that Jenssen offers as to communicate and, if so, what? Biosphere, was thinking interna- his working process. Did he go vis- The last track on N-Plants is the for Remember Me, a track tionally, and his pursuit of a theme 11, are gathered now on N-Plants, it? Did he stay at home and look at only one to touch down expressly originally released two years sent his mind travelling from Eu- a striking new Biosphere album photographs, build models, chart on the album’s stated theme. earlier and, fantastically, later rope to the “post-war economic that pits an unwitting sense of out angles from blueprint plans? Over some synthesised electronic reissued as a double A-side miracle” of Japan. Not exactly the portent against a disquieting air of Did he consult with shadowy sorts The Mihama nuclear power plant in Japan. Issei Kato / Reuters whirling and a series of severely with a cover of a Wurzels track. first thing that springs to mind mystery. who know more than is generally constricted beats, it features the when thinking of subjects to ad- Geir Jenssen has been making known about potential radiation voice of a Japanese man talking. dress by way of ambient electronic ambient electronic music under danger? such a track – and all the others on mere musical tones. But some of by some of Biosphere’s peers. for digital music, works with aural To a listener not versed in Japa- music, but then, what is? the name Biosphere for a decade, None of that is clear, and so it is N-Plants – with corresponding titles the exceptionalism owes to a sim- Also out on Touch, the same Lon- cues taken from underwater re- nese, he sounds nervous, reti- The photo he chanced upon and most of it has been at least hard to divine what is going on in like Genkai-1 and Monju-2 (though ple question worth asking: is work don-based label/multimedia-en- cordings of cod and shrimp. cent, maybe anxious about the The Crystal Method showed the Mihama nuclear pow- a little bit mysterious. His clas- a track like the brooding, burbling not Fukushima, the name of the of the kind even really music? In terprise responsible for N-Plants, At what point, in cases of the potentiality of a menacing event Tweekend (2001) er plant, which sits majestically, sic album Substrata, held out as album-opener Sendai-1. It reveals plant that has been the source an article in The New York Times, is Cross-Pollination, a curious re- sort, do the connotations of to be delivered in some eerily like a strange sort of mechanico- a touchstone of the genre since itself over the course of eight min- of such troubles in Japan of late) Brian Eno – mastermind of what cent release made up of material sound and music diverge? Or unidentifiable way. He might be The second album by DJ futuristic resort, on the coast of its release in 1997, layered atmos- utes, with a mix of subtly seething – from what might otherwise be most of us now know as ambient recorded and recontextualised might they remain the same? talking about radiation danger duo The Crystal Method is Wakasa Bay. He found the plant pheric sounds with excerpts of environmental noise and what classified as more or less conven- music – addressed his own recent by the artists Chris Watson and Does it even really matter? or the precariousness of certain and others like it beautiful but speeches from the television se- sounds like a simulacrum of a tional electronic music. Much of yearning for a different term of art. Marcus Davidson. One piece fea- One of the pleasures of ambient nuclear-plant locations or the most interesting (within the also bewildering. He couldn’t help ries Twin Peaks, and his 2004 re- muted horn in mourning. At the that owes to the unique production His offering to take the place of tures a time-compressed version music is the way it squirms free of weird unknowability of tech- confines of this playlist), for but wonder: “Are they safe when it lease, Autour de la Lune, was made root of it is a gently cycling me- touch of Jenssen, whose music as “music” in such cases was sonema, of actual sounds heard at night tidy either/or propositions, and nology at large. Then again, he its cover art. If you are either comes to earthquakes and tsuna- in mind of 19th-century science- chanical hum, the kind of sound Biosphere sounds improbably spa- an invented word meant to signal a in the Kalahari Desert; the other in fact works to affirm both sound might just be talking about the long in the tooth or eagle-eyed mis?” fiction writer Jules Verne and nois- you can imagine issuing from a big cious and weighty. His widescreen 21st-century set of priorities given calls on a human choir to interact and music as guiding principles, weather. you’ll be aware it appears to This was in early February, a little es from outer space. Samples of grey machine covered with feeble vision and wandering sense of pa- to “sonic immersion and environ- with the sounds of bees swarm- each on its own terms. parody the cooling towers and more than a month before Japan the sort abound. yellow caution tags. It’s eerie but tience in tracks that take their time ment”. It’s less music than some ing in an English country garden. In the case of Biosphere es- Andy Battaglia is a New York- deckchairs of Supertramp’s was devastated by both. The re- But none could have foretold the also beautiful, like an elegy. to unfurl tends to pay off, and his other medium – or at least it can be Jana Winderen, another artist on pecially, it would be a mistake based writer whose work appears 70s opus Crisis, What Crisis? sults of his work, finished before mysteries that greet N-Plants. Fore- It’s also an enigma, which goes robust bass sounds come across helpful to think of it that way.