New releases last four weeks: Leftfield

Review: Geir Jenssen (Biosphere) marks his AD93 debut with The Way Of Time, wrapping elucted echo and looping synth drift around spoken fragments of Elizabeth Madox Roberts' great 1926 novel The Time Of Man. A Midwestern gothic literary staple, Roberts' novel is about the daughter of a Kentucky tenant farmer, and Jenssen's haunting use of Joan Lorring's voice from the 1951 radio play adaptation readapts his usual icy predilections for suitably huger desert horizons. Rather than treating the vocal as ornament, he folds it deep into the mix, letting it dissolve into the melodic architecture.

Review: Elizabeth Madox Roberts' The Time Of Man (1926) is an episodic modern novel, tracing the life of Ellen Chesser, the daughter of poor white tenant farmers in rural Kentucky. Roberts treats the main character's movement through different landscapes and seasons waveringly, grappling with poverty, loss, love, and the push-pull between solitude and connection by way of a lytic narrative that shifts and resolves atemporally. Biosphere's new record carries the transmission chain further, naming itself after the novel while interspersing its hiss-topped drum machine actions with vocal snippets from Joan Lorring's radio play version. Slowly transcendent, Biosphere presides with arid royalty over a slow but satiating new six-track release.