Ismistik - ‘Remain’
No. 9 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
The quiet masterpiece of Norway’s Bjørn Torske and Mette Brundtland, Ismistik’s Remain, is a bittersweet, dreamy record. It sounds like it was literally handcrafted, gentle care put into every electronic note and beat. So that decades later, its delicate beauty still glows with a numinous light that renews mind and spirit, like the stars and solar winds that strafe the northern horizon, and the breath that awakens embers, enchanting the soul with the mythic powers at world’s end.
At the heart of that human, warming sound was a longing from the outskirts of humanity. Ismistik hailed from the small harbor city of Tromsø, which sits in the northern reaches of Norway inside the Arctic Circle and in the middle of the Aurora Borealis zone. It’s a magical but harsh setting. In summertime, the days are long and beautiful with a deep blue ocean glittering under snowcapped mountains. Flowers and animals creak into activity after long slumbers. And from May to July, the “midnight sun” never sets, circling round the top of the world, and shifting the edge of sleep.
But in winter, Tromsø is shrouded in cold darkness, as the polar night extends from October to March. With the stars shining bright, this “Detroit of the North” turns into a frontier settlement at Earth’s edge, its boats and ships sputtering off in the distance like spacecrafts, while the mystic show of the Northern Lights limns the sky with curtains of green, purple and red — electrons dancing across magnetic fields.
Remain refracted all of these natural phenomena. As music critic Tim Barr once declared, Remain was the inspired sound of a group “surfing romantic moods, experimentalism and pure electronic genius” — perfectly capturing the native yearnings of Tromsø’s electronic scene, which included Röyksopp‘s Torbjørn Brundtland, Biosphere‘s Geir Jenssen and Mental Overdrive‘s Per Martinsen: Norwegian romantics reaching out with a new global idealism for the age.*
The opening, delicate ‘Absence’ falls like a ghost of an avalanche in slow motion. ‘Orange Peel’ and ‘Woodvibe’ chirp with melodies fine as sunshine creeping through a morning mountain cloud. And the understated ‘Bulb’ is hands down one of the most beautiful electronica compositions ever written, “swooning,” as Barr so perfectly described, on heartache and determined optimism — a flicker of northern light.
As an album, Remain celebrated the natural far far more than the technological. The song titles make this clear, but it also comes through clearly in the burbling samples of ‘Running Water’ and the ambient shimmers of ‘Tortoise Thoughts,’ as well as the icy, astronomical, techno pointillism of ‘Flowcharts Remade.’ Even in the frantic pace of ‘Cassis,’ a whistling mournful melody seems to wind through a cassis seashell. It’s followed by ‘Daybreak,’ another pagan encounter, with sun rays on the headlands.
You can hear this dichotomy brought into an unfussy harmony throughout Remain. Perhaps even its most straightforward dance composition, ‘Phidou,’ its odd name a possible allusion to Phidoloporidae (a branching invertebrate coral, the kind that peppers the hundreds of thousands of reefs all along the coasts and fjords of Eggakanten, the vast Norwegian underwater shelf that runs up to Svalbard), rhythmically drives and grooves, shuffling like the swishing of Arctic waters.
So that the album’s conclusion feels less like an ending and more like an eternal journey round the Arctic. ‘Cycling’ takes the warming sun of ‘Absence’ and leads us through the darkness of Scandinavian sunsets, trudging over the drifts of coldness, in pursuit of a cosmic light that gives life to the small and the big, as long as the spirits inside animals and humans still know they can go the distance. A little spooky, its melancholic beauty, deepened by chords of resilience, gives us sustenance — in Ismistik’s diametric orbit, of Brundtland’s quieting gentleness, and Torske’s ever winding restlessness, we are left with the impressions of a new perseverance.
At the turn of the tides of time, Remain represents a kind of compass for the techno globalist. How can an album with such deep chill in its bones sound so warm? There is an inner fire that burns inside it, like the fire in a wooden hall, the smoke trailing up, up through a hole in the ceiling. Outside — the sound of the ice cracking, the thrum of a winding river by the coastal plain, ocean waves crashing on the shore, the boats go “putt-putt,” the stars, the clouds, the Northern Lights. Inside — the beating heart.
“The lasting darkness of the winter months definitely had an impact on creativity, mainly because I needed something to focus on,” Torske explained in 2018, when he was asked about the effect of Tromsø’s long winters and midnight sun on his early psyche. “And it also messes up the biological clock, so I developed an affinity for staying up nights whether it was light or dark.” Perhaps he had found within and without, a deeper time, a time that keeps Remain in touch with big impressions.
These big impressions started with radio transmissions: Torske originally formed Ismistik with Ole Johan Mjøs, an outcropping of their Brygga Radio show (“Brygga” meaning “The Pier”), following in the footsteps of Vidar Hanssen’s Beatservice and Jenssen’s Bleep Culture. Was there anybody out there? It turned out, there was. So in time, Torske and Mjøs released three notable E.P.’s on Djax, including the house music beauty, ‘Oasis.’ But by 1994, Torske had migrated to Bergen, entering a warmer clime, a thousand miles south of Tromsø where his days grew longer, shorter, more even.
There he found more green and less white, more running water and less ice. “I don’t really listen to much music in my spare time, I prefer walking in nature listening to its subtlety, insects, birds, brooks,” he told If-Only’s Jess Dymond in 2018. Becoming his new home, Bergen was still on the west coast of Norway on the North Sea; listening to Remain, one can picture Torske dreaming of Tromsø’s auroras as Bergen’s university city vibes bustled and bubbled over quays and fjords from side streets to ship fleets.
“Ismistik as a project mirrored my early years when Chicago and Detroit were my biggest influences,” he told Dymond, still leaving the door open to the Arctic drift of Tromsø, techno’s northern capital. “Not meaning that I love these styles less now than back then, but I see music more as a whole rather than fragmented in different styles. I might make something which in the start sounds very much like techno, only to later develop it into something different.” And that different has pulsed out to the world.
Which brings us back to the bobs and weaves of ‘Bulb,’ its name at once conjuring the image of a lightbulb, perhaps one going off in our heads, or the image of a flower bulb under the soil: the base, the root. A work of perfection, it encapsulates the warm and otherworldly sound of Remain and gives it the pulsing heart that makes the album a triumph of the human imagination. Why? It can’t really be put into words — one can only feel, as one might feel the gentlest vibration of the Earth, under the snow. Our circadian dreams are what make us babble and articulate. For Ismistik is mystic.
And at its heart is still a great unknown — who is Mette Brundtland? Few seem to know and there has been no word from Torske either on Brundtland’s contributions. Did they meet in Tromsø? Were they lovers perhaps? “Mette” is a woman’s name in Scandinavia and it means “pearl” — sea-gray gem made inside an oyster. Possibly hidden in this mystery is the melodic magic that flows inside the songs of Remain. Rippling ever outward, perhaps here is the other side of this wintry music, not just Tromsø’s ice and Arctic romance, but of Bergen’s many crossroads and fjords.
The longest and deepest fjord in Norway is Sognefjord and it runs east for 205 kilometers, about 70 kilometers north of Bergen. Its the fluidity of Remain that in many ways makes it so remarkable; and the warmth of its harmonies and the arc of its starry melodies go far and wide like the clear waters inside the sheer cliffs of a fjord; and its several branching freshwater tributaries, flooding from rivers in the spring — still running and carving from many smaller fjords, a landscape shaped by glaciers.
A photo of Torske performing live on the album’s back cover is also credited to Brundtland. He is credited as the sole songwriter on the album, Brundtland as co-producer. Were her contributions more around the edges? Or did she help craft and produce the sound, the spirit, the vibe of Remain? We know she is Torbjørn’s sister, of Röyksopp. Was she more a confidante, a catalyst? Perhaps it doesn’t matter and the truth is something mundane. Still, one wonders. Absence. A ghost of an avalanche. Deep emotion. A Sognefjord of sound. Running Water. A well. A trickle. A current.
She has vanished. In an electronic music production world long dominated by men, Brundtland is the shadow that represents everything electronica has long claimed as moral high ground but that points to a more profound truth. Women have always been at the center of techno, from Juan Atkins’ grandmother, who fed his love of music, to the Icelandic druidism of Björk, to the soaring singing of Rozalla, to the synthesizer innovations of Delia Derbyshire and her arrangment of the Doctor Who theme. No, Ismistik is no different but stands out because of Brundtland’s phantom presence.
While masterstrokes like ‘Absence’ and ‘Bulb’ may have flown entirely from Torske’s brilliance, there is something somehow more precious and prescient about Ismistik’s more feminine and more feeling sound. Orange Peel. Woodvibe. Daybreak. Yes, the land and the sea and the sky were obviously great sources of inspiration. But it also captures the human, the life that occupies such times and spaces. One often thinks Norway is cold and remote and vaguely Viking in a longboat and fearless way. But inside Norway, its people think of themselves much more broadly even if natively.
That’s what makes Ismistik’s only album sound so personal. It both fits and sounds quintessentially Norwegian and Northern. But it is also universal, perhaps the most universal sounding electronica album of the 1990s. That comes down to its simple, unhurried, and yet heartfelt passages — as if life was fleeting but also infinite. Like birds migrating and cycling across countless islands and fjords: the Sea Eagle, ptarmigans, gyrfalcons, eagle-owls, puffins, eiders, grouses, geese, terns.
That peacock feather on the album’s cover? How strange and out of place. Nevertheless its tropical eye-like pattern somehow fits perfectly, as clear an image of Remain’s mysterious sound and origins as anything — a marvel of nature, its barbs like the splintering fjords and rivers of Torske and Brundtland’s homeland. Did it represent somehow the foreign waves of techno lapping against the granite and quartz shores along the coasts and fjords of the north way? The schist and gneiss rocks of layered metamorphic pressures from glaciers and centuries of erosion, of feldspar and mica, crushed and cycled and pushed through time into a pearl from a raver’s imagination.
A quarter century after Remain’s release, the Norwegian label Hjemme Med Dama, released on cassette a rare live recording of Ismistik performing in 1993 — just before dawn at a rave in Oslo, the capital of Norway about 300 kilometers east of Bergen, the year before Torske and Brundtland shaped their fay impressionist masterpiece into its final form. The impressive DJ and folk raver Ørjan Sletner, AKA “Kompressorkanonen,” recommended in the liner notes to “play it loud, close your eyes and imagine that you are standing in a run-down concrete hall with a smoke machine on full blast. Because that's exactly how it was” — raw, bumping, and yet from inside, ever sky-dreaming.
Torske, who uncovered the lost tape in his archives before the COVID-19 pandemic, no doubt rediscovered something familiar yet distant in it: the anything-is-possible baseline of the underground returning to him, and all those who cherish techno’s earnest resistance, and rave’s sincerest openness. Noting that the Oslo rave had chillout rooms and fruit bars (“that was the kind of thing you did in the nineties”), Sletner waxed wistful, remarking “there is only a fenced pile of rubble where the building once stood — a lunar landscape” — another rave and its phantom wave.
It’s an archetypal memory, of an “old workshop building located in a no-man's land where Bjørvika meets the Old Town, sandwiched between train tracks, a container port and Norway's busiest intersection.” This was an Oslo before its new sleek slate opera house, an Edvard Munch museum, and a futuristic office park along the Bjørvika inlet, “long before they eased away the containers and built a beach.” For “nobody under age five swam in Bjørvika at that time. If you took a dip there you probably became luminescent afterwards. And it wasn’t exactly easy to find it if you weren’t familiar.”
Torske had come a very long way from Tromsø to Oslo. In the years since he played in that old factory rave and since Remain, he has released many more albums, including a collaboration with space disco maestro Prins Thomas. Regarded by Prins Thomas, Lindstrøm and Todd Terje as one of the godfathers of Norwegian electronica, it is unsurprising that Torske has continued to influence northern techno in his own idiosyncratic way.** Whatever he does, as Sletner observes, there is a “Nordic temperament.” And yet one that is north of North, fire-borne in a wood house.
“The future is hopefully not just looking up its own arse, but taking into account all sorts of music,” Torske told Family House Magazine in 2007, when he was pivoting harder toward more organic and disco-ey sounds, explaining his delicate approach to sound design and his searching philosophy. “I favor music of old times, pre-electricity … [I get inspiration] from a lot of different elements of life, but mostly in the darker corners of society… both tragic and uplifting.” Like the sun, that ends cold winters.
While Torske moved further from electronics over time, those same dark corners of the tragic and the uplifting, from Chicago and Detroit, and the isolation and extreme tidal polarizations of Tromsø, shaped the glowing glaciation of Remain. Written and recorded in a golden era for electronica — 1994 — its remote milieu in the Arctic climes of northern Scandinavia still slightly froze its far equatorial propagation.
“Music history, to me at least, isn’t linear as in measuring the years, it is more like an outwardly expanding universe,” he told If-Only; so that a thaw of world spring may let old streams run into the moonlight plain. “Good music never goes out of date.” In that reminiscence, the circadian is in some ways an illusion. Perhaps only someone from Tromsø might keep that closer to heart. That time is woven, yet also ever open.
Subsequent releases by Torske under his own name for Ferox, Tellé and Smalltown Supersound took on a sunnier flavor, the Northern Lights of his hometown increasingly faint in his grooving chords. Which makes the singular brilliance of his debut album with Brundtland all the more wistful, their intuitive sense of melody unmatched; Brundtland simply disappeared, her grace part of its enduring attraction.
Made at a time when electronic music was trying to reach every remote outpost of humanity, Remain’s simultaneous appeal and obscurity remains a poetic testament to the power of Ismistik’s romantic wonder. It’s a light in darkness. And it’s the little album that still could. For it gives those who find it, big awesome chills.
Track Listing:
1. Absence
2. Woodvibe
3. Orange Peel
4. Running Water
5. Cassis
6. Daybreak
7. Bulb
8. Tortoise Thoughts
9. Phidou
10. Flowcharts Remade
11. Cycling
*Tromsø’s Aedena Cycle also made international waves in 1994 with The Travellers' Dream E.P. on Apollo. Torbjørn Brundtland and Sveine Berge, who would later go on to form Röyksopp (which means “mushroom cloud” in Norwegian), were founding members. Aedena Cycle’s Gaute Barlindhaug would continue on alone.
**Most of Torske’s dance music post-Remain has been disco-flavored, though he experiments with all kinds of styles when exploring chiller modes. A longtime friend of Prins Thomas, since they met each other in Bergen, Torske has described his sound as “skranglehouse,” which roughly translates to “rattle house.”
This eccentric and eclectic approach to music also evinces even his sense of humor. One of his many aliases is Codfather — a play on godfather and his surname: “torsk” means codfish in Norwegian. His first name means “bear.” So, “bear, cod.”
However, “Torske” is actually a derivation of “thaskvin” – which as he explained to If-Only’s Dymond, means “a grassy plain by a pool in the river,” which describes a farm called Torske in the Tromsø region that his paternal ancestors once lived on. I allude to this connection with my “old streams run into the moonlight plain.”
I shared what “Mette” means already, but “Brundtland” is also interesting because “brundt” derives from Old Norse “brunnr” which means “well” or “spring of water”; and “brundtland” means “land by the spring” or “spring land.” And so I allude to wells, springs and fjords for “Brundtland” as well as “Mette” for “pearl.”
The point of invoking the meaning of both Torske and Brundtland’s names is to illustrate how strongly tied the Norwegian people are to nature and their northern environment, a place and history filled with elemental power, and a key dimension of their music, showing up in their song names, artwork and timbres.
As I note in No. 10, Daft Punk - Homework, the era of global techno and electronica was picking up full steam in the years right before and after the debut of Daft Punk’s Homework in 1996. The British were at that vanguard most powerfully, along with the Germans (think Tresor and Harthouse) and the Belgians (R&S Records). Holland was also in its nascent stages, with Saskia Slegers’ Djax Records launching in 1989, providing a home for Ismistik, and Stefan Robbers’ Terrace project, eventually spinning off his own techno label, Eevo Lute Muzique. Also, Speedy J.
However, even at import-heavy outlets like the Virgin Megastore in Los Angeles, as an employee, I never came across Ismistik in the “Electronica” racks. I only learned of Remain later. However, I did come across and purchase Biosphere, and relatedly, I discovered Sweden’s excellent Svek label at that time, starting with their classic compilation, Lords of Svek, where I first encountered Jesper Dahlbäck, Cari Lekebusch, Sunday Brunch (Dahlbäck and Seba), and Adam Beyer.
Suffice to say, in parallel with the “French Invasion,” was also the “Scandinavian Invasion,” of which Torske was a part, also appearing on Svek. Other critical labels, like Code Red, Hybrid and Beyer’s Drumcode, made major impacts with 12” vinyl releases, shaping DJ sets around the world. In time, Röyksopp would make a big mark in 2001 with their acclaimed debut album, Melody A.M., while Those Norwegians had also softened the global scene with their Kaminzky Park album in 1997.
In the 2000s, Prins Thomas, Lindstrøm, and eventually Todd Terje would “follow” Torske’s lead into the space disco pastures, a sound also prefigured by Svek releases like Sunday Brunch’s beatific ‘Midsummer Night.’ The Swedish flavor of poppier progressive and electro house would emerge later with Swedish House Mafia.
During all this time, Biosphere continued and continues to release a steady stream of ambient and ambient techno works that attract and deserve worldwide attention. Torske is in many ways his more rhythmic Tromsø twin.