Biota - Funnel to a Thread (2015)

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 and sounds – or none - and use instrumental resources that span half a millennium and two thirds of the planet to create unique combinations of timbral colour in constant motion; this is a music in which everything is in flux, constantly dissolving and reforming and mutating while, from a distance, there is calm. It’s a music in which movement and stasis share a single endless moment. And although we arrive nowhere, the path beguiles, both familiar and strange and – on this record – strangely comforting. As always it’s meticulously recorded, with layer on layer of subtle processing and mixing. Like all their earlier releases Funnel has been some five years in the making. You can hear why. Comes in a lavish package with copious artwork by the Biota/Mnemonist collective.