Biota / Mnemonists

Long live Biota!

Caught up with the first two Mnemonist Orchestra albums this week. Even if things didnt really click in until Horde, still something unique and very organic / social about those records. The real surprise is hearing the Roto-Limbs cassette and its focus on long evolving minimal electronics, I enjoyed that one very much

Found this while searching for more info on the Orchestra albums: http://rampantzone.com/blog/2008/12/22/the-mnemonist-orchestra/

Have to say though, listening to Horde again for the first time a while on my new car stereo, and... That album just does not waste one second of anyone's time, less than a minute in everything around you turns itself inside out

I finally bought the CD reissue of Horde based on this thread revive, I especially like the last long piece

xxp finally got to that link, thanks Milton

New album 'Fragment for Balance' finally arrived last night

Continues trajectory of pulling back on the processing. The sound is still far away from literally acoustic but closer than ever to Americana ensemble music. It's telling that I could now actually reference other things like the Marc Hollis solo album or Rachel's or Jim O'Rourke or Linda Perhacs to describe the territory on this record instead of just being stuck saying 'well it's a Biota record' but even saying that doesn't really describe how they got here. Without the treatments, the chamber arrangements suggest folk music but the tonalities wander off at the exact moment you normally expect them to land. The weirdest note in the clearing becomes the bedrock for the next song.

Not much processing on the drums! What is this?

Packaging softer than ever

Thanks for the heads up, didn't know there was a new one

oh for fuck's sake:

http://www.rermegacorp.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Category_Code=CC&Initial=B&CatListingoffset=24&Product_Code=Biota+Box&Store_Code=RM&Initial=B

This box collects five representative releases that span their discography and track the radical evolution of their crystalline aesthetic – with added documentation, a band history, insights into their work process, and a full-length bonus CD embroidered from their archive of rare and unreleased material.

Contents: Funnel to a Thread, Half a True Day, Invisible Map, Object Holder and Gyromancy (recorded as the Mnemonist Orchestra), and the box-only bonus Counterbalance.

bonus disc is under 30 minutes :(

what I wish the box had:

1. Attributes Of A Living System
2. Mnemonist Orchestra
3. Roto-limbs CASS
4. first S/T Biota LP
5. CD version of the Awry 10" plus compilation tracks (from ReR Quarterlies, the No Man's Land comp, etc)
6. bonus disc

well I ordered the box anyway, I guess I can sell the CDs I already have if they are the same

searching around and found some interesting references to interviews where members of the group talk about how they didn't feel the vinyl format of Rackabones or Awry translated to CD releases

https://www.progressiveears.org/forum/showthread.php/23045-The-Biota-Box

Milton you absolutely need the booklet that comes with the box set bonus disc, it goes into great detail about their history, gear, and working processes.

Milton you absolutely need the booklet that comes with the box set bonus disc, it goes into great detail about their history, gear, and working processes.

― Ambient Police (sleeve), Tuesday, June 11, 2019 4:12 PM (five months ago) bookmarkflaglink

any chance this information can be found online? I have always been curious about their working methods and gear but can't really afford a box set right now

Paul, I don't have a pdf or anything but please see my reviews below for some tangential notes informed by the liners. Happy to elaborate a bit more if u want.

Background: I started re-listening and capsule-reviewing my CD collection around 18 months ago, I got behind but I did write reviews for all the Biota CDs I have (i.e. all of them), and might as well post here.

Original writing is at:

https://shardsofbeauty.blogspot.com/2020/05/fuck-it-im-just-gonna-start-writing.html

Biota – CD discography

Some general words here: I think the Biota discography represents the largest single-artist group of CDs yet in my collection (11 discs). Listening to all of it in order really helped to put their output into perspective as they celebrate their 40th anniversary this year. I just finished listening to the new album as of this writing, and it’s been very interesting to read the detailed description of their working processes included in the “bonus” Counterbalance CD (from the new box set). They have made some of the most amazing and indescribable music I’ve ever heard. Here’s my capsule reviews.

Biota – Bellowing Room (1987)
I own some earlier work (Mnemonists “Horde” and “Gyromancy” CDs, Biota’s “Rackabones” 2LP), and have the S/T “Biota” LP and the two early Mnemonists LPs and Roto-Limbs tape as sharity-blog MP3 downloads, but Bellowing Room is where you can really hear their style come into focus. Sidelong tracks, with their trademark effects already firmly in place. Basically you have a free jazz drummer, a classical guitarist, a jazz keyboard player, and a group of drunk ren-fair rejects crashing the party with accordion, zither, the insistent bleating of a ney or other reed instrument, and assorted other throwback instrumentation. Then the whole jam session is put through hallucinogenic layers of processing and post-production mix/matching, until the sound shifts and swirls and slithers and slides all around the stereo field, and different things bubble up out of the mix at various unexpected times, receding just as unexpectedly. As the years have gone by, the processing has become more subtle, particularly on the last two releases. Similarly, the instrumentation has skewed more and more into the “modern chamber music” realm, with more piano and recognizable sounds. On this early effort, you can really hear the free jazz and noise roots, the sound is way more massive and heavy and dense, but unlike the earlier work as Mnemonists you can hear the separate elements on the album. Things swirl, combine, break apart, and recombine. Instruments drift in and out of focus.

Biota – Tinct (1988)
Shorter tracks (2 on one side, 3 on the other) and a further refinement of style, but this is still pretty murky and undefinable compared to everything that came after (the Awry 10”, released after this, is a great collection of short pieces that is well worth tracking down). The psychedelic processing continues to take on a life of its own.

Biota – Tumble (1989)
This is where it gets really good. From the very start, as Tom Katsimpalis’ clear acoustic guitar lines ring out, everything is way more beautiful and melodic. Yet the structures are still bewildering (everything gets weird around 1 minute in when the ren-fair people crash through the door and the mushrooms kick in) - it turns out upon reading the new booklet that they would frequently mix different improv sessions together on purpose. The songs take lots of twists and turns amidst the slowly unfolding melodies and riffs – the accordion in particular really takes center stage here. The pieces tend to be longer still, in the 5 minute range on average. The peak of their early period and an indispensable album.

Biota/Mnemonists - Musique Actuelle 1990 (2004)
An outlier in the catalog, recorded over a decade before release. In the new box set booklet the band describes a harrowing & stressful scene around this rare (only?) live gig, recorded under less-than-ideal circumstances at a Montreal festival. Released by Anomalous Records and not really very similar to their then-current sound, this is more like the Tinct era material with additional live orchestra (and live sound). Probably the least essential release of the ones covered here.

Biota – Almost Never (1992)
Scored (??) orchestra starts to creep in here, this is a bit less distinct than Tumble and the individual pieces are blended into three long suites. The upbeat bagpipe melody that comes out of nowhere around halfway through is one of my favorite Biota moments. At least I think it’s a bagpipe? One of the strengths of this band is in making instruments sound like other instruments, it could be a hurdy-gurdy or like a fuckin harmonica or something, idk. But in general, this disc is a bit less memorable than its classic predecessor, although just as distinctive and unique in sound.

Biota – Object Holder (1995)
Another huge leap forward, many fans (including myself) were shocked by the actual songs with melodies, lyrics, and vocals that show up interspersed throughout the refractory pinwheels of hallucinatory sound. Suzanne Lewis’ work on vocals here is very distinctive and these are great songs on their own, impressively integrated into the work as a whole. The band also seems to regard this CD and the period that followed it as one of their peaks, this one and the two studio discs after it make up half of the new box set.

Biota – Invisible Map (2001)
A consolidation and expansion of the new worlds of sound unveiled on Object Holder, this one is even better and might be their peak. A different female vocalist here, I like Genevieve Heistek’s voice & violin work even more than Suzanne Lewis on the previous CD. Sometimes the lyrics/vocals are blurred into indistinguishable sounds, a trick which they would revisit next time. 37 short tracks that basically act as their own hidden magical universe of sound. A stunning achievement.

Biota – Half a True Day (2007)
Even weirder and arguably even slightly better than Invisible Map. They finally settle on a 3rd female vocalist, Kristianne Gale, who has been on every release since this one. Her work here is different than the surprises found later on – here she is just a chopped up blurry smear of sound, you can’t even distinguish phonemes let alone syllables. 70 minutes of bewildering immersion, Tom Katsimpalis’ guitar work is particularly lucid and crystalline here, as well as achingly beautiful.

Biota – Cape Flyaway (2012)
Once again, basically every Biota fan (i.e. all 100 of us) reacted to this with “wtf is going on here”. Gale steps into the center stage as a vocalist, using traditional folk songs as raw material. The thing is, it doesn’t sound like raw material – it sounds like a mashup version with an old folk song playing over a new instrumental background. But the familiarity of this vocal approach, in my opinion, works against their strengths as a band – making unrecognizable/uncategorizable music is one of their best attributes. The vocals here sound familiar, very much of this world, and not so much related to the trippy slip/slide/smear/shift bewilderment of Biota at their peak. For me this is a failed experiment in the end, although it’s interesting to hear and the non-vocal stuff sounds great as usual. I think it’s telling that this wasn’t included in the box set, while the three before it and the one after it were.

Biota – Funnel To A Thread (2014)
A resounding return to form, on these later records the processing starts to recede into the background and the structure/sound begins to skew more towards “small chamber orchestra” than “psychedelic witch’s brew”. The sound and structures are still pleasingly disoriented and off-kilter, though.

Biota – Fragment For Balance (2019)
Even less processing, even more of a chamber music vibe. I’ve only listened through to this twice, that’s all I got so far.

Biota – Counterbalance (2019)
Kind of bafflingly compiled, a “bonus disc” in the new box set that contains what seems like a bunch of outtakes from the new CD and one older track at the end. I’m still glad I sprung for the box because the very detailed booklet included here goes into great detail about their working process and its evolution over the years, which is fascinating to me.

Thank you, sleeve! This is awesome and much appreciated.

should get that box just for the notes. whenever I go back to one of them I usually go through all of them. been listening to 'Awry' a lot recently, that's like a punk EP, 2-3 minute songs

Invisible Map grew on me, especially the last third, but for whatever reason, while I was taking them home new between 2-3 year pauses, that was the one that seemed like a falter. and Flyaway I didn't mind simply because the last direction I was ever expecting them to go was straight up Judy Collins

this band!

I've got "Rackabones" but all my vinyl is in storage and haven't heard it in years.

Almost Never / Invisible Map / Half A True Day / Funnel To A Thread yesterday after sleeve's post (alternating with Roland Kayn 2001-2003)

started with two lesser travelled ones. Almost Never is a little more ambitiously symphonic, and some parts do flow right past you, but that bagpipe part sleeve talks about is second-by-second so etched in my brain that I knew I needed to hear it again, and the 160bpm scramblecore ending is up there too

it's a beautiful thing to hear Invisible Map described as the band's peak, this band is vast enough. this one is not symphonic, it's constant little songs. I remember in 1989 being flummoxed by those first two Throwing Muses records until Hunkpapa baked it down to only one or two riffs per song. well there are a lot more than two riffs per song on Map but it's still like the one where they're leaving the gate open and the food they're serving looks like food you've actually eaten before

Half A True Day might be my favorite one. I might even tell people to start here before Tumble. Every section is perfect and every part is connected to every other part, perfect flow, no down time. the songs would be beautiful played acoustically, and the processing's been reinvented just enough; new sounds blending in but still more forest than machine.

Funnel's good. Last two have been beautiful though the post-Flyaway trajectory is increasingly vaporous, they could open up. Leaving Half A True Day out for the rest of the week but probably have to go through the others too

https://legendarypinkdots1.bandcamp.com/album/see-it-alone

“Sorry For Laughing” is the solo project of Gordon Whitlow, who has been part of the Biota collective for four decades. I followed his work since the beginning, so when he approached me to collaborate on a project involving dusty old hammond organs, a wheezy old accordion and various string driven things, I had no hesitation in shouting a loud “YES!!” As the project progressed , the idea arose of inviting Martyn Bates (Eyeless In Gaza) to join, who is another artist I’ve admired on a creative and personal level since the dawn of the Dots.
When violinist extraordinaire, Patrick Q.Wright is added to the mix, as well as interjections from Kiyoharu Kuwayama, Janet Feder and Nigel Whitlow, then a thing of serious beauty became inevitable.
The wonderful Klanggalerie released this small wonder as an immaculately packaged cd over here: www.klanggalerie.com/gg358
-EK

almost time for a new one maybe? any updates from the wilds of Fort Collins?

(this revive prompted by me finally getting Bellowing Room on LP)