UK experimental institution Touch is now out with a split album from Biosphere and Deathprod, titled Stator.
The two Norwegian artists have been producing ambient and other abstract musical forms on their own for well over two decades. Biosphere, real name Geir Jenssen, is likely known best for his classic 1997 album Substrata, though he's put out more than a dozen LPs since then, including many for Touch and his own label Biophon. Meanwhile, Deathprod, AKA Helge Sten (once part of the band Motorpsycho), has explored somewhat darker sounds, and maintains a constant studio presence with plenty of technical credits. Jenssen and Sten have worked together before, but it's been a while: they reconfigured music from the composer Arne Nordheim for a split full-length back in 1999, Nordheim Transformed. They'll take a similar approach on Stator. (As a press release points out, the title is an engineering term for "the stationary part of a rotary machine or device," derived from the Latin term for "one who stands.") The roughly 40 minute-long album features three original tracks from Biosphere and four from Deathprod, and Sten himself took care of the mastering.

"Stator, the second split release of weathered Norwegian musical unsettlers Biosphere and Deathprod (the first one appeared way back in 1998), is an impressively sequenced record of classic electronic ambient bravura. Its mysterious title referring to both rotating and non-rotating parts in engineering and aeronautics devices, the duo explores these opposite characteristics across seven individually delivered tracks. Although it's quite obvious to discern who contributed to which track on a stylistic level, the album convinces as a whole through a rigorous yet open structure. Biosphere's opener "Muses-C" introduces pensive, minimal percussive motifs, whereas Deathprod's "Shimmer Flicker" offers solid quasi-Wagnerian drones accompanied by a sense of dread. The remainder of the album delivers a darkly enjoyable listening experience, with each artist thoughtfully complementing the other's contributions. Whereas Biosphere mostly provides subtle yet rhythmic trance effects, Deathprod's somewhat noisier and more abstract contributions contain balanced counterpoints. Stator convinces as an urgent reminder of the undoubtedly legendary status of these two celebrated ambient-deities, holding a lesson in conceptual consistency and depth of sound." Other Music