(Translated from my original Italian text by Gemini and Piero Scaruffi)

Seattle native Jeff Greinke was educated at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1980s, where he directed a radio program dedicated to avant-garde music. In 1982, he founded Intrepid in Seattle with his friend Rob Angus, through which the duo published several avant-garde works (four cassettes: Night And Fog, Before The Storm, Over Ruins, Moving Climates). In these works, they used loops, sampling, and noise with ease; however, in accordance with Brian Eno's teachings, they did not use them to generate "concrete" suites, but rather to produce slow and atmospheric sounds, generally "ambient" in nature.

Greinke soon distinguished himself as a more purely electronic composer with Cities In Fog, which remains one of his masterpieces. In the paste of indecipherable noises of Moving Through Fog and the submerged voices of Urban Pastures, the term "atmospheric" acquires a more metaphysical than earthly meaning. Bordering on industrial music, Maintain Circulation introduces an alienating metronomy into the project's spatiality—an unnerving temporal quantum. Bordering on cosmic music, Metal From The Sky is furrowed by intergalactic buzzes that lose themselves in total desolation. In the slow, underwater decay of Among Icebergs lies the clearest formulation of his cadaverous musical aesthetic. These are visions of the underworld, chilling frescoes of Charons transporting suffering souls. Greinke's is a trance that is not therapeutic but depressive, not mystical but atheistic.

Cities In Fog I & II (Projekt, 1998) is a double CD that collects the original Cities In Fog (Intrepid, 1985) and a continuation composed in 1995. The sounds of Moving Through Fog are blurred with gruesome timbres that echo like steel boulders dropped onto lead plates. Urban Pasture further complicates the harmony with sampling and deformations of even more sinister sounds—resembling boiling gangrene or the damned in hell—and suddenly the atmosphere becomes murky and distressing. At this pace, one reaches the industrial noises of Maintain Circulation, amidst which one seems to perceive collapses and sirens. The disc collapses in Scud, the darkest track. Metal From The Sky thus seems like a catastrophic version of the cosmic music of Klaus Schulze: equally pictorial and cinematic, but infinitely more shadowy.
The first disc, recorded under precarious conditions, had the virtue of conciseness. The second can indulge in longer tracks, from six to nine minutes. Perhaps due to this dilation, the sound is much less threatening. Greinke focuses on detail rather than the ferocious effect of the whole. Harbor Island is a collection of impressionist miniatures rather than an articulated poem. The metallic rumbles and reverbs are always unsettling psychological cues, but, staged with greater composure, they no longer frighten. The harmonic masses of Between, the slow-motion effects and disturbances of Still Fall, could perhaps be placed within the repertoire of 1970s avant-garde music. However, the long digressions of The Corner, City Light, and Low Ceiling lack a central focus.

Places Of Motility expands the composer's harmonic tools, though it does not substantially change his obsession with dilated and fluctuating sonorities.

Timbral Planes, with greater attention to melody and exotic elements, highlights the most original part of his art—the otherworldly quality of his music: the diluted sounds swollen into amorphous echoes of Slow Fall and Cloud Swell, the underworld drones woven with organic rhythms of the title track and Mirrors, the sidereal stasis and subliminal buzzes of Glacial Return, and the cubist decomposition of melody in Upon Reflection constitute, if nothing else, a suggestive deepening of Brian Eno's psycho-ambient period.

The disc preludes the turning point of Changing Skies, in which Greinke definitively abandons the harmonic studies of his origins (which, truth be told, had given rise to rather repetitive solutions) and subscribes to Jon Hassell's program of ethnic primitivism.

Subsequently, his timbral research became more sophisticated, with sound sources rendered evanescent by electronic manipulation, but the results were merely faithful imitations of the sound micro-landscapes of late Brian Eno (on Lost Terrain and In Another Place), or else a cryptic accumulation of "concrete" experiments (Big Weather).

In the ensemble Land, Greinke is joined by Lesli Dalaba's trumpet, in addition to guitar and percussion. The sound abandons its ambient rigor and indulges, in a somewhat confused and uncertain manner, in jazz, rock, and world-music whims.

This Brian Eno of the Pacific Coast has the undoubted merit of having correctly interpreted the spirit of the British master, but the limitation of not yet having managed to move beyond those premises.

Greinke continued to experiment new avenues on Swimming (Prudence, 1998), an unusually rhythmic effort, Ride (Hypnos, 1999), a jazz album featuring bassist Fred Chalenor, drummer Greg Gilmore, bass clarinetist Craig Flory, and the two albums credited to Hana, his joint project with angelic Sky Cries Mary's vocalist Anisa Romero, Hana (Hypnos, 1999), and Omen (First World, 2001). But the results were, at best, inferior to his masterpieces.

The Land project continued with Archipelago (Periplum, 1997) and Road Movies (First World, 2001)

The nine psychological vignettes of Wide View (Hypnos, 2002) and Weather From Another Planet (2003) persevered in a more facile form of music.

Soundtracks (2005) collects music for films, ballets and multimedia events.