James Bernard 'Atmospherics (30th Anniversary Edition)' [2CD]

Two glass-mastered, silkscreen printed CDs housed in a 6-panel, 300g satin cardstock Digipak. Clear cd trays. Numbered. Includes insert and download card. Shrinkwrapped. Pressed and printed in the Canada. Edition of 200.

Past Inside the Present is proud to reissue James Bernard’s landmark 1994 ambient masterwork, Atmospherics, remastered and packaged with a brand new, track-by-track interpretation of the entire album by friend and collaborator, bvdub.  While these versions are separated by an ocean of musical and technological change, together they form a cohesive image of adventurous musicianship, melodic and textural richness, and stylistic timelessness.

Originally issued by legendary UK imprint, Rising High – home of the seminal Chill Out or Die and Secret Life of Trance series, as well as early works by Luke Vibert, Pete Namlook, and many others – Atmospherics quietly earned cult classic status in an era when ambient music was just getting its legs as a cultural movement, and as a response to the burgeoning rave scene.  Bernard himself was creating acid trance pieces under the names Influx and Cybertrax, but was “in a fragile state of mind, searching for [a] center, and many of these tracks began as meditative sketches to help with getting to sleep at night.”  He hints at this in some of the album’s enigmatic samples, like on “Phosphorus”, where a narcotic, echoing voice repeats, “The most difficult thing I’ve ever tried to do, is to clear the mind.”

For Bernard, the creation of Atmospherics was an immersive process of self-instruction, discovery, and experimentation with comparatively minimal means.  Using only a keyboard, sequencer, 12-bit sampler, drum machine, and bass guitar, he recorded each movement in real time, with no overdubs or edits.  Because he was toggling sequences, tweaking synth and sample parameters, and playing bass concurrently with the DAT rolling, any misstep meant having to restart from scratch.  Knowing this, complex, meticulously layered journeys like “Euph” and “Odyssey” become all the more impressive, as they push the limits of the tools of the era.

Bernard further notes, “Listening to the album now with fresh ears, I can remember how excited I was to explore different ways of shaping feelings into sound.  Learning about synthesis and different audio production techniques, I was truly getting lost in it, and I’m still just as excited to learn about new modes of expression and creation.”  Fittingly, across the 76 minutes of Atmospherics, the listener is taken through a constantly morphing world of lush, analog forms, mesmerizing arpeggiations, and fully-realized environments that were well ahead of their time.

One early disciple of the album was bvdub (aka Brock Van Wey), who discovered it by pure happenstance during his days as a DJ, when a copy arrived at his local house record shop by mistake.  Van Wey was drawn in by the album’s aura, remembering, “From its black, monolithic, strangely endless physical form, to the infinite worlds within, I was hypnotized, transported, and altered.  I knew I would never be the same again.”  He still considers it the most important record in his musical history, and that deep love is the drive for this reissue’s second half: a full-length reenvisioning of the original.

The bvdub versions of tracks like “Helix” and “Lost In It” take the staccato elements of their source material, and explode them into reverberating nebulas with thick blankets of granular detail.  He treats the spirit of each piece with the utmost care, while venturing into different dimensions and refractions with a trademark tinge of melancholy weight.  In short, James Bernard’s Atmospherics gives us liftoff and the journey beyond Earth’s gravitational pull, while bvdub’s iteration offers us the Overview Effect, looking back on the fragility below with a sense of splendor and blissed-out majesty.

The two artists have now been friends for many years, previously collaborating on the album Departing in Descent (Past Inside the Present, 2022), so it was natural that Bernard would ask Van Wey to be a part of this very personal project.  Van Wey was honored, stating, “Never did I dream that I, some random DJ kid making punk-ass raver music, would ever have the opportunity to work in this way with the most important ambient album ever made.”  Atmospherics is a totem of his existence that has seen him through numerous transformations – both musically and geographically – and his treatments of these tracks pay homage to those decades in a fascinating, stereoscopic vision.

Van Wey summarizes, “Fear, ecstasy, exaltation, and millions of memories flood every rendition I made, telling the story of those thirty years all at once.  I will never know how James managed to produce Atmospherics, but it doesn't matter.  Throughout our friendship, I’ve learned how much of our personal histories, both in and outside music, basically amount to one life experienced by two people in different physical spaces, each unknown to the other.”

Written, recorded, and produced by James Bernard, 1994
Tracks 10-18 produced and reworked by Brock Van Wey (bvdub)
Mixed and remastered at Ambient Mountain House by James Bernard, 2024
Design and layout by zakè

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