The Return of the Revenge of the Woefully out of Print Friday (Strikes Back)

Each Friday I'm going to dig through my cd collection and talk about a cd that really should be available for purchase, but alas and alack is gone daddy gone.

This week I'd like to dig to the early days of techno with a little record called The North Pole by Submarine by Bleep.



1990 was a year of changes in electronic music. Most notably Bel Canto founding member Geir Jenssen wanted to branch off from the band and record something new and fresh. So Bleep was born. In a 2004 email interview with The Milk Factory Geir Describes it as happening ...by accident. In the summer of 1988 I started listening to acid house and techno. The second Bel Canto album, Birds Of Passage, recorded in the summer of 1989, had some elements of this music. While recording Birds Of Passage in Brussels I also worked on my own material in a small 8-track studio nearby. This was the first time I used a sampler. This material became the Bleep album The North Pole By Submarine.

North Pole by Submarine had a club hit A Byte Of AMC but Geir lost interest the project as he wanted to avoid unwanted associations with the UK Bleep techno scene. Thus Bleep was no more. Jenssen released the first Biosphere record Microgravity in 1991. This album however stands as an interesting monument to the early workings of the man who would redefine ambient in the late 90's.

One interesting tidbit that I dug up about the record. According to legend Geir Jenssen signed to R&S the same day as the Richard James. The two met in the label's offices where Aphex admitted to listening to The North Pole By Submarine almost every day!

download A Byte of AMC
download Cycle 92

Biosphere page