Substrata is a 1997 album by Biosphere, the project of the Norwegian musician Geir Jenssen, released by All Saints Records. Here Jenssen set the beat aside almost entirely in favour of slow tones, softly echoing guitar, chimes, howling wind, creaking wood and running water. Critics have tied its cold, still atmosphere to the Arctic, where he worked in a home studio above the Arctic Circle during the dark season.
Several tracks weave in spoken fragments, including dialogue sampled from the television series Twin Peaks and from a 1993 documentary about Russian psychics, adding a faint unease to the calm. In 2001 the label Touch reissued the album as Substrata 2, a double CD pairing a remaster with Jenssen’s 1996 score for Dziga Vertov’s silent film Man with a Movie Camera, commissioned by the Tromsø International Film Festival. Pitchfork placed it among the fifty best ambient albums in a 2016 survey.