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CD
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RER BCD9
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"After 4 years of work on their 11th release for ReR, this extraordinary, reclusive, and highly individual audio-visual collective continues to evolve through the painstaking accumulation and disposition of a seemingly incompatible range of both exotic and familiar musical languages, instruments, techniques and studio manipulations into one of the few genuinely original bands at work today. It took a long time to refine their unique process of composition to this level of ambiguity and depth and newcomers will wonder how they strayed so far from orthodoxy and yet managed to retain a lucidity and transparency that is quite rare in contemporary music. The bullet points are that Biota is a unique project, defying genre with, like all such cult artists, a small but extremely dedicated public that, over the last 15 years has grown continuously as new listeners discover them. Founded in Colorado in the late 1970s, Biota's first recordings were released under the name of the Mnemonist Orchestra who, between 1980 and 1984, released five albums on its own label, before linking up with ReR."
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6CD BOX
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RER BIOTABOX1
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"After 4 years of work on their 11th release for ReR, this extraordinary, reclusive, and highly individual audio-visual collective continues to evolve through the painstaking accumulation and disposition of a seemingly incompatible range of both exotic and familiar musical languages, instruments, techniques and studio manipulations into one of the few genuinely original bands at work today. It took a long time to refine their unique process of composition to this level of ambiguity and depth and newcomers will wonder how they strayed so far from orthodoxy and yet managed to retain a lucidity and transparency that is quite rare in contemporary music. The bullet points are that Biota is a unique project, defying genre with, like all such cult artists, a small but extremely dedicated public that, over the last 15 years has grown continuously as new listeners discover them. Founded in Colorado in the late 1970s, Biota's first recordings were released under the name of the Mnemonist Orchestra who, between 1980 and 1984, released five albums on its own label, before linking up with ReR."
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RER BCD8
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"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, color 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 unpredictability. The band now takes, on average, five years to prepare, record and finalize a new release. They're in no hurry."
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RER BCD7
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"After 5 years of extensive and careful work, the new and much anticipated CD by this extraordinary collective, who have no parallels, no rivals and no peers, is at last complete. It's a dense and indescribable orchestration of electric and acoustic guitars, clavioline, trumpet, Hammond organ, micromoog, biolmellodrone, electric and acoustic violins, bass, mandolin, accordion, piano, rubab, kit percussion and sometimes voice, layered and radically processed in the unique Biota manner. There is a leitmotif of folk elements in this piece that emerge from the roiling, swirling quicksand of sound we now expect from Biota, with texts by WB Yeats and snatches, arrangements and influences floating by way of Christy Moore, June Tabor, Judy Collins, Sandy Denny, Bert Jansch, the Bothy Band and older traditional sources. Biota craft sonic worlds that relate to, but are not built like, the music with which we are familiar; for them time is a continuum rather than a sequence of events; a simultaneous present in which past and future possibilities exist conterminously. With a 24 page full colour art portfolio from the Biota collective."
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RER BCD6
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"Six years in the making, this is the sixth CD released by ReR from the visual/sonic art group Biota. Unique in their history and method, Biota painstakingly construct complex, organic structures that mix extensive studio processing and musique concrète techniques, with a highly eclectic orchestra of acoustic and electronic resources: from kit drums, through medieval winds, strings and barrel organs, to early experimental electronic instruments. Their works are always performance driven and interleaved with successive stages of lamination, imbrication of parts, and radical pre- and post-processing. 'As the title suggests, in this new work a portion of a cycle -- a repeating segment of time -- is explored. We employed repeating and overlapping motifs of different lengths, allowing their staggered interaction to produce varying degrees of harmonization, dissonance, masking and reinforcement. Unpredictability of outcome was furthered by electronic processing -- both manual and automated, random and predetermined -- and by the appearance, taken out of context, of unrelated passages taken from earlier projects. Real-time performers had to interact with this instability as they constructed their contributions, and later as they gave form to the final composition. Although there are elements of chance at work in the process, the eventual architecture is intentional, and carefully worked. Mixing was done by hand and without the aid of computers, then the composition was assembled and integrated digitally.' --William Sharp, Biota. The interaction of staggered, overlapping elements reveals a changeable truth about the whole as the parts variously harmonize or dissent; reinforce or cloak one another in their unfolding. The project is, at heart, about uncertainty. Players encounter the shifting interplay between previously recorded parts juxtaposed with instrumental snippets -- out of context -- introduced from the group's archives. Electronic processing programs are employed to apply semi-random and semi-intentional alterations to the proceedings."
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RER BCD5
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"If fans of Biota were shocked by the pop songs that appeared for the first time on the previous Biota release, Invisible Map is going to send them reeling. They are sung by Genevieve Heistek, from the same school of Montreal musicians who spawned Godspeed You Black Emperor. The songs provide a central point around which Biota hang their esoteric production ideas. Crazy shawms suddenly spurt out of the mix, unsteady tripping rhythms from the drums counterpoint interlocking guitars, and unsettling sound processing pushes the material to the edge of oblivion. The tracks were built up from solo accordion or rubab, drums and guitar, and the whole piece is woven into an ambiguous cinematic journey. Mixing and effects were applied in real time, 'by hand'. This gives a wonderful spontaneous feel to the music, and Biota have made an art out of accepting and working with freak accidental effects."
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RER BCD3
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3rd CD. So alien it'll cause you to question all previous modes of mental-thought motion.
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RER BCD4
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Biota's fourth CD finds the band expanding into new, almost recognizable styles (ie. songs!). "...the group's 12th major release... and its first to involve the singing of Susanne Lewis and percussion of Chris Cutler. These new voices join the delicate, Satie-like piano of C.W. Vrtacek amid the circus fray. The usual Biota trademarks are still present: dangerous studio-based sound processing, unsteady, tripping rhythms, strange, medieval fanfares, and undersea melodies featuring bizarre instruments."
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RER BCD2
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This CD reissues 2 of their LPs from the 80s, "dense, dark icebergs of sound, shifting like layers of dirt-plate grafted onto yr skull by one Dr. Benway's interns."
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CD
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RER BCD
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A 1989 release, their first intended strictly as a CD issue. A loose, studio-only collective from Colorado, Biota's reputation is based on an unparalleled ability to create a reality-shaking wall of dense sound, though they generally limit themselves to acoustic instrumentation ("treated" to devastating levels). Pure sound aesthetic and attention to detail dominates every second of their various releases; few American sound artist collectives have ever maintained such sonic integrity for so long. "...where nothing is quite in focus, timing is distinctly idiosyncratic, and landmarks loom in and out of the fog."
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