Biosphere - Departed Glories

Aye, it's a shame he's eschewed segues after the lovely continuity you got in albums like Substrata and Cirque

The 90s albums flow so well. I never got why some artists just abandoned that approach.

I'm loving this album. The little snippets of vocals that keep surfacing and then getting lost in the droney soup again, it's really great. Perfect music for late night working.

Despite my reservations I picked this up today when shopping for the new Orb record, decided to give it a proper go. Having the opportunity to put it on and listen to it reveals a very different album to that I heard from a more cursory glance on Bandcamp. It gradually envelops you. Some incredibly beautiful stuff on this, very haunting. The last track, in particular, is absolutely wonderful.

The cover gives me nightmares. It's like a ghost....

This album is so wonderfully haunting, I keep coming back to it over and over. Lovely to put on at bedtime!

hey! everyone! I like this!! 

Yeah, this is ace. Got it on vinyl some time ago. Love the cover also.

It sure is a very nice surprise. I didn't know the album was coming out and bought it as soon as I got the news. It's something like a painting, really beautiful.

I had a few listens to this again today after some months. It does have a lovely cover and there are a few nice moments on here but most of it I still find distinctly bland and strangely unmoving. For all the praise heaped on it, I think it's a rather sterile and unemotional record. It also pales away completely compared to Substrata.

Put it this way, if someone told me I couldn't listen to it ever again, I wouldn't really care.

How Bleep think this is one of the best of 2016 is a complete mystery to me. They're obviously hearing something I'm not.

well he's never going to top substrata

  On 12/9/2016 at 7:51 PM, dr lopez said:

well he's never going to top substrata

No, that would be nigh-on impossible and a bit pointless anyway. I dunno. It's one of those albums that I keep coming back to because everyone seems to like it so much and yet I can't see why.

if it's helpful i have no idea why it's so good either. but I completely love it and consider it a stone cold classic. or rather - I completely understand the criticism and complaints. somehow all the ambient tropes colluded into one incredible cinematic journey. I like a lot of other biosphere but I kind of believe substrata's quailty just sort of happened by accident. These days it also seems incredibly dated in a great way. like the 90s

might be the twin peaks samples

Without Substrata, my opinion of Biosphere would be one step lower on the music ladder. I really enjoy all of his albums (except Shenzhou, which I'm hoping to reassess comes the inevitable reissue next year), but Substrata just took things to such a next level that everything else feels brilliant just because it's created by the same person.

Anyway, anyone who found Departed Glories cold and uninteresting might be interested to know he said in an interview that he likes each album to be very different from the last, and is working with analogue synths on his next record.