Since the late 1970s Biota has ploughed its own furrow, producing a body of work that resembles nothing anyone else has done or is yet doing. Their compositions evolve in long, constantly shifting timbral blocks filled with fragments and echoes of quasi-familiar musical languages. They use instrumental resources bridging half a millennium and two thirds of the planet to create unique combinations of texture, colour and movement. It's a music of constant flux, dissolving, re-forming and mutating without agitation or stress, where motion and stasis blend into a single ambiguous condition. And although it will never arrive, the path, with its simultaneous familiarity and strangeness has an eerie power to compel.
The recordings, as always from the Dys Studio, are meticulous and carefully constructed - the fused product of generation after generation of processing and mixing. There's an almost Feldmanesque quality of necessity and unpredictabilty. The band now takes, on average, five years to prepare, record and finalise a new release. They're in no hurry.
01 Falling In Wood 02 Receptor 03 Double Unfound 04 Hearsay 05 Half Dwelling 06 Shed 07 Misnoticed 08 Understory 09 Numberless Years 10 A Dozen Moons 11 Winder 12 Not A Single Thing
13 More Than Say 14 Take Warning 15 The Land Away 16 Whirl Round 17 Hand Nor Glove 18 High Painted Streets 19 Till Time And Times 20 Usually The Guesser 21 Choosehow