Biosphere and Higher Intelligence Agency

Birmingham Frequencies (1999) ...

A collaboration between Norwegian Biosphere (Geir Jenssen) and Bobby Bird (HIA) of Birmingham, this is the second part of a two-part project.   Ambient music from a multimedia show presented on top of the Rotunda building (a landmark of Birmingham, England)...

Birmingham frequencies ...

"Polar Sequences and Birmingham Frequencies are two parts of a same project. Polar Sequences, released in 1996, was recorded two years earlier, during Tromso’s Polar Music Festival. Tromso, hometown of Biosphere’s Geir Jenssen, is situated 70 degrees north, above the Arctic Circle, in Norway.
In 1995, the organisers of the festival commissioned Geir Jenssen and Higher Intelligence Agency’s Bobby Bird, a series of three concerts, using environmental sounds recorded in the area. The concerts were given on top of a mountain, where the audience was brought to in turn by cable car.
The second part of this project was put together by Bird and Jenssen, using a similar approach, this time set in Bobby Bird’s native Birmingham. The chosen venue was on the twelfth floor of the Rotunda, situated in the heart of the city. The one off event also featured videos and digital images, as well as a café and one of the best views over Birmingham.
The music created for the two events is very similar in form, the two artists creating a slow moving, chilled soundtrack. But where Polar Sequences feels very natural, using sounds of snow and melting ice, the only human interaction being the cable car, Birmingham Frequencies is definitely more urban. Voices of children playing in a park or a pelican crossing alarm are amongst the sounds used as the basis for the creation. These two records are complementary, and Jenssen and Bird both bring their own creativity and technology to a very interesting project. Absolutely unmissable." ...
ambientmusic.co.uk ...

"Birmingham Frequencies finds its home in the modern city, a meshing of styles that both artists have played with up until the release of this collaboration, but colored by a very different soundscape than either have attempted to explore in the past. Switching from formless ambient drawls and splashes of synth noise interspersed with lo-fi field recordings, beat oriented incidental samples, and acoustic instruments penetrating the hazy synthetic world, Birmingham Frequencies is impressionist sound design taken to new heights of evocative power. It is the sonic expression of isolation in an environment that is saturated with faces that have no meaning and places that aren't homes. Somehow, these two artists have managed to create a collage of sounds that, even without contextual foundations, coalesce into auditory representations of images and likenesses that are paradoxically and simultaneously relatable and foreign all at once." ... sputnikmusic.com ...