Elizabeth Madox Roberts’s 1926 novel The Time of Man told the story of Ellen Chesser, an itinerant young farm worker tending the fields in rural Kentucky in the early 20th century. The book made Roberts a literary sensation and earned her a Pulitzer Prize nomination. In 1951, the story was adapted into a radio play starring the actor Joan Lorring; that recording in turn found its way into the orbit of Geir Aule Jenssen, aka Biosphere. His amorphous, textural strain of ambient music has traditionally gone hand-in-hand with snippets of dialogue; so it is with The Way of Time, which slips fragments of Lorring’s girlish Southern twang in amongst pale synth washes and the implacable tick of drum machines.
On paper, it’s an unlikely pairing. The Norwegian artist’s music has a cool, synthetic quality that reflects something of the environment in which it’s made: A well-equipped studio deep in the Arctic wilderness of Tromsø, stocked with an arsenal of Roland, Korg, and Akai hardware. A far cry, you’d think, from a hardscrabble existence in the early 20th-century American South. But Roberts’s book was more than a testimony to hardship. On the contrary, it framed its protagonist’s life in Homeric terms, a noble struggle of a solitary individual against the whims of fate. It’s this more spiritual and philosophical quality that Jenssen latches on to, taking up Chesser’s words and presenting them as a series of deep ruminations and profound truths. “I wonder how deep the sky is,” she wonders on “All Stars Have Names,” as synth lines streak like meteors across the audio field.
A ruminative tone permeates The Way Of Time. “The Old Way Was Gone” and “Time Of Man” evoke the rolling spaciousness of the Kentucky landscape through cloudy washes and gentle synth arpeggiations. Jenssen does raise the tempo in places, notably on “Like The End Of The World,” which recalls the sort of gear a UK dubstep label like Deep Medi or Punch Drunk might have issued in the late ‘00s, a blend of tense, cracking snares and bassline wub. But even then, The Way Of Time feels designed for contemplation, gazing skywards in search of answers to the biggest questions.
