The Fires Of Ork – The Fires Of Ork 2

Emotive space ambient from the gods. Gone are the techno moments of the first
so this album feels more cohesive and both collaborators are really tapped into
one another. Shame there will never be a third outing :(

"Nouvelles Machines" is good, "A Way To Focus The Mind" is great but "Sky Longe" is just amazing

Don't listen to ex_penumbrae, this is one of the best Biosphere releases if not THE best one. I have everything Geir Jenssen has done since the Bel Canto days, (except for a couple of Bleep 12"s and a few obscure remixes) and for me this is one of the most atmospheric and haunting things he's been involved with. To be honest I'm not a big fan of his more experimental later works but this one strikes a nice balance between deep dark ambient and a more accessible ethereal melodic sound, all with that icy tonality that defines Biosphere. There's a few other nice Jenssen touches scattered over this such as movie / voice samples and environmental noises (sounds like it could be early usage of the Tibet recordings). These blend perfectly with everything else and Jenssen has a knack for using such things to superbly enhance the music where with a lot of artists it could sound gimmicky.

This is a feeble album, hardly worthy of the "ambient" epithet. Like so many similar releases, the album is littered with clichés & hackneyed ideas of what ambient should be. Far from approaching any kind of “beauty”, the result is just bland and boring. A tediously overlong drift through a sadly (and, at times, laughably) predictable soundscape, this is most definitely to be played solely as background music. But only when you've already left the house. Avoid.

While the first Fires of Ork was very impressive, this one is simply beautiful. Starts with Biospher-ish "In Heaven", the title speaks for itself. The best on the album imho. Then we've got dark, minimal "When the Night...", something to listen to in the night, in the wintertime... Then we come back to ambient soundscapes of "Sky Lounge", again feeling that it was Jenssen who did it. For the fourth track you have to focus your mind - once more some minimalism there... And the last track, the longest, maybe made with (by?) some new machines, is a little bit comeback of the old days, maybe of the first "Fires...". Hope they will meet again for a third album of such importance for ambient music.