I Mnemonists, an electronic collective formed in Fort Collins (Colorado) by William Sharp and several friends (some musicians and others visual artists), specialized in albums of frantic, animalistic collages of synthesized sounds. Their sound is the electronic-modulation counterpart of the Spectorian �wall of sound,� a few decibels louder. The prevailing tone is decidedly dramatic and oppressive, often reaching unbearable levels of tension, like in a kammerspiel or a comedy of the absurd.

Mnemonist Orchestra was performed by thirteen musicians: trumpet, trombone, alto sax, guitar, piano, bass, voices, percussion, etc. Mark Derbyshire is the tape manipulator who pieces together the hundreds of free fragments; Bill Sharp is the ideologue and spokesperson. The four movements of the symphony unfold in a completely chaotic and uncoordinated manner, with independent and random sound elements following one another at high speed: monologues, jazz improvisations, background distortions, toy noises, bursts of electronics, and so on ad infinitum. Input is the archetype: instruments and free voices in the style of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, with clown-like trumpets, other instruments tuning with indifference and nonchalance, guitar distortions, bell chimes. In Vulnerable the squealing of a saxophone in an electronic tornado flows into a demented hard-rock for out-of-tune guitars, with a frenetic and dissonant conclave of horns. In Corrosive a faint piano sonata is overwhelmed by a chaotic free-jazz jam. The masterpiece is Stasis, yet another disconnected delirium of horns over a percussive bed made of random gongs, broken objects, clock tickings, and beaten sheet-metal; a decadent orgy of crumbled sounds. These are pieces of the absurd that owe more to avant-garde jazz than to rock or electronics. Their paranoid ritual unfolds along a precise emotional thread, a convulsive gesturing that leads to psychic collapse through a progressive rarefaction of the material.

Some Attributes Of A Living System (with sixteen members and an arsenal of symphonic-orchestra instruments) is a summa of �junk culture.� The first disc contains twenty-two Fragments comprising: electronic chamber music (1), cello solo over assorted cacophonies (2), concrete-music concerto (4), sonatas for television commercials (6), free-jazz jams with phoneme collages (5), surreal saxophone solos in the Coxhill style (8, 10, 12, 17), absurdist recitations with noises (9), sonatas for distortions (14), for broken objects (16), for Subotnick-style electronics (18), for strings and bells (19), ending in a long agonizing cello howl into nothingness (22).

(The two albums were reissued together in 1984 as a double album.)

Horde (for an ensemble of nine musicians), pushing this technique to the extreme, is a symphony of musique concr�te. The work opens with a Babel-like chatter that slowly fades into an increasingly violent and disjointed electronic-percussive vortex. Out of that chaos emerges a jazz-minimalist fanfare flayed by guitar scrapes. This is followed by an austere chamber-noise piece that degenerates into a confused electro-pneumatic bubbling. The second part is introduced by whistles and subsonic waves that then mutate into a jumble of mechanical pulsations. A medieval saltarello opens the subdued finale of popular ditties in which the last trace of human feeling seems to vanish: a series of blasts shatters the now almost silent landscape, and a whirlwind of tapes hurled at insane speed sweeps away any residual hope of civilization. Horde is a therapeutic shock, more realistic and prophetic than the previous works, a requiem for the looming atomic holocaust.

It is no surprise, then, that Biota instead looks like a dark and menacing futurist suite, a tragic ode to the civilization of machines. Its novelty lies in the rediscovery of tonal structures.

This 41-minute electronic poem exhibits the quality of an orchestral work. It shuns the episodic nature of a musique-concrete collage as well as the wild nature of a free-jazz jam, opting instead for a form of abstract soundpainting. An ominous blend of rumbling and creaking noises lays the foundation for a landscape that evokes science-fiction worlds teeming with android life. The second movement (13 minutes from the start) is a gargantuan wall of noise spiraling out of control. The B-side opens with the intense buzzing of a jungle that soon mutates into the hissing of high-tension wires and finally decays into a last long breath. The fourth movement indulges in a cacophonous freak-out jamming but soon (nine minutes into the B-side) the music returns to the cosmic dimension, this time with an elusive electronic whirlwind. This in turns slows down and warps until it yields a simple carillon-like melody that is smothered in the last few minutes by a sudden invasion of squealing aliens.

Pared down to a six�piece band, the Mnemonists released Gyromancy (Dys, 1983 � ReR, 2005), performed entirely on acoustic instruments but electronically tortured to the point of becoming unrecognizable�a work that is at once their most radical and analytical manifesto and their most accessible album.

Gyromancy (Dys, 1983 - ReR, 2005), a 39-minute piece recorded by a line-up of six musicians, and entirely played on acoustic instruments (piano, cello, guitar, vass, viola, sitar, harpsichord, bagpipes, clarinet, trombone, percussion and many others), although electronically tortured to make them unrecognizable, was their most radical and analytic work yet, but also the most accessible up to that point. The symphony begins in a subdued mode, unleashing several incoherent drones and unrecognizable noises. As the volume intensifies, the drones expand. After 14 minutes the "music" comes to a pause. Electronic processing dissolves the identities of the instruments and leaves in their place only a dark nebula of sound. Slowly, during side B, individual elements become discernible again, although they are now only warped mirror images of the instruments that produced them. This faceless, anarchic and percussive flow of events is progressively accelerated until it becomes a frantic orgy that makes everything coalesce into an organic and terrifying buzzing noise. The music collapses again after 13' of side B, and never quite resurrects, content of slowly burning off the few parts that are still alive.

Rackabones, a double album consisting of two suites performed on winds, strings, and percussion subjected to electronic processing, is the closest they came to the work of the electronic ensembles. The first suite, Vagabones, is a lugubrious danse macabre of the industrial age�a sort of hybrid between the cacophonous percussive rituals of the AEOC, the surreal tribal�rhythm pieces of Pere Ubu, and the unintelligible phonetic magma of the Residents. Its second half indulges in an even more menacing ceremony, even richer in percussive effects, disjointed fanfares, deformed solos, off�key counterpoint, grotesque harmonies, primitive rhythms, and gratuitous noises, masking the frenzied kinetic logic of the collage within a whirl of citations and allusions (which, however, never resolve into truth). Immersed in a climate of anguish and tension, the other suite, Rackabones, approaches a sorcerous sarabande, with Walpurgis�like cadences, spells whispered by possessed choirs, infernal visions of burbling and miasmatic electronics, and ghostly screeches in the distance. Between a submarine raga riddled with guttural screams and a sonata for percussion and dissonance, between a tempestuous electronic vortex and a quasi�mantric stasis, the suite advances towards a finale of cosmic catalepsy. Massive, pantagruelian, and terrifying, Vagabones and Rackabones distill the moral of fifty years of musical experimentation.

Having abandoned both the collage form and the documentary approach, the composition is now strongly unified, powerfully dramatic, and highly cohesive. However chaotic, random, and dissonant, the whole unfolds thematically and assimilates every sound into a fully constructed dramaturgy. The sheer quantity of events is staggering: every minute of music is an unlimited catalog of potential sounds. The atmosphere, in turn, evokes a post�apocalypse, when no linguistic civilization remains and only an abstract de/graded form of future�primitive gesturality survives.

The Mnemonists changed their name to Biota after a split that left the title �Mnemonists� to the accompanying theater troupe. The band, which had lost Derbyshire and stabilized around Bill Sharp, Mark Piersel, Steve Scholbe (saxophones and clarinets), Larry Wilson (percussion), and Gordon Whitlow (acoustic instruments), now also included Randy Yeats and Tom Katsimpalis, who in the past had handled the choreographic component.

Bellowing Room is a forty�minute suite almost entirely for metallic noises, benefiting from superior recording quality. It is a continuous flow of sound that draws on the idioms of industrial music (obsessive metallic polyrhythms, sinister ritual�chanting) and avant�garde jazz (convulsive free�improvisation jams, the syncopated fanfare that opens the second section). Especially evocative is the finale�stuttering accordion and a pervasive chaos of random noises after so much sonic tempest. More studied and less emotionally intense, Biota�s art is the baroque of �musique concr�te.�

Their mature sound has a symphonic quality that increasingly recalls the tumultuous scores of Charles Ives; organic and catastrophic, primitive and arcane, it occupies a vast dark void of the musical universe.

Their collage form is in fact the summa of half a century of avant-garde�from Edgar Varese to Frank Zappa, from Sun Ra to Faust, from the Art Ensemble of Chicago to Gordon Mumma. The Mnemonists repudiate melody and harmony, adopting instead a senseless drift of artificial sounds and natural noises. What distinguishes them from the �concrete� composers is the abnormal quantity of detail that becomes part of the collage process, and the total estrangement of one fragment from the next. There is no connecting algorithm: if the concrete musicians developed a plot, however abstract, the Mnemonists merely �photograph� the landscape. What they share instead with the jazz musicians is the hideous and clownish chaos of jams such as Stasis and Vagabones, where the logic of the irrational triumphs. A monumental cross-section of our musical civilization, the work of the Mnemonists rises from the rubble of meaning, a lofty song of the semiotics of acoustic signs.

The progressive rapprochement with the new jazz is confirmed by the next album, which repudiates the monumental character of the previous works and adopts the more concise form of a collection of pieces. Tinct gives free rein to their anarchic imagination in labyrinthine pieces of free jazz�often openly swinging�devastated by bursts of industrial music (Tottery), by organ chorales and horrific tribalisms (Riddled), by exotic percussion, sustained accordion chords, and magic formulas (Astray). But the structure is that of free-improvisation jams, and the swinging rhythm is never lost, not even in the most convulsive phases. With its predominantly percussive sound and its dizzying dissonances, Lapse is the most insidious and surreal piece of their career. Tinct is the turning-point album�the album that opens new horizons for the flood-music of the Mnemonists/Biota.

Even more overtly musical, the sound of Awry amounts to a kind of �concrete folk,� and it foreshadows Tumble, an album constructed by electronically manipulating the sounds of acoustic instruments: the banjo for the hyper-kinetic country and western of One Eye Open, flutes and accordions for the rustic village fanfare of Wire Talker, bagpipes and rattles for the Middle Eastern lull of Operator For Cataract, guitar and drums for the ballad When They Know. The percussive and surreal free jazz of Tinct survives in abstract vignettes such as House Of Suitcase, Things Seem Like Just Happen, and especially Picture By Accident, with the full orchestra deployed and a riotous brio. But the album�s true peaks are perhaps the dissonant slow-motion accordion and scattered noises of Buffalo Come Back, the somber electronic poem Shadows Appear To Do, the virtually all-percussive maelstrom of Ghost Shirt, and the surreal piece The Less Said. After a decade-long career as musical subversives, the avant-garde�s most uncompromising collective thus arrives at a relatively simple sound, one that preserves a taste for harmonic chaos yet draws on the classic genres of the popular repertoire.

The music of this phase relies more heavily on traditional instruments. Individual contributions thus become decisive: Katsimpalis�s guitar, Scholbe�s winds, Whitlow�s accordion, Wilson�s percussion, and Yeats�s concertina are the distinctive sounds of this new course.

Musique Actuelle (Anomalous, 2004) documents a 1990 live performance.

After Almost Never (Recommended, 1992), a transitional work (recorded between 1989 and 1992) structured into three multi-part suites (of which Circling These is unusually "folk-ish"), emphasising James Gardner's flugelhorn, Biota changed course and introduced the (female) voice into their demented soundscapes. Object Holder (Recommended, 1995), a set of songs dropped in the middle of a futuristic collage (with James Gardner on flugelhorn, Tom Katsimpalis on guitar, Steve Scholbe on guitar, William Sharp on tapes, Gordon Whitlow on accordion and keyboards, Larry Wilson on drums, Randy Yeates on keyboards), was basically trying to create a new kind of "pop music".

The experiment of voice-driven concrete music was repeated on Invisible Map (Recommended, 2001), in which the (37!) songs have become the infrastructure and the scaffolding of the collage. In The Rapid Color, the female vocalist (Genevieve Heistek) hums a simple melody while string instruments (Tom Katsimpalis) strum carelessly, drums (Larry Wilson) explode psychedelically and the saxophone (Steve Scholbe) screams to the sky. Another simple melody (but this time with real lyrics) is the victim of Landless, a real lullaby accompanied by accordion and violin (Heistek). Birthday is another lullaby, slow and intimate, despite the rumbling background. Glazed Paper is half Scottish march and soothing dirge. Dual drowns dreamy vocals in skipping jazzy beats and out-of-tune guitar. These folk-tinged ballads evoke the Walkabouts in a parallel universe.
The instrumental pieces (many of which are barely a few seconds long) tell the same story, just a bit more deranged. A drunk accordion (Gordon Whitlow) leads the folk dance of Port at a demented pace marked by an army of percussion. Not any more sober, accordion and violin moan together in the waltzing Yarn. The sloppy, atonal, incoherent Paste evokes the Holy Modal Rounders. The surreal vignette of Sleeping Car, the possessed spaghetti-western of Snake Out, the spirited square-dance of Flicker, the swirling Slavic sarabande The Slow Forest, not to mention the comic Alpine spoof Presto the Human, compose a dramatic revision of American roots-music.
The free-form jam Mineral and the disjointed sonata Measured Not Found are mere rehearsals for more mayhem to come.
Gardner, Sharp, Yeates and Chuck Vrtacek on piano form the backbone for the unpredictable textures of these songs and instrumentals, but they hardly produce a lush sound. It is quality, not quantity.

Biota's Half a True Day (august 2007 - ReR, 2007), recorded over the course of six years, continued to refine their anti-concrete technique of creating highly musical works out of painstakingly layered found and processed sounds. The accordion proto-melody of Pack-and-Penny Day, the frantic syncopated rhythm and atonal guitar strumming of Hidden Compartment, the spaced-out psychedelic raga of Angle of Doubt could have been part of structured rock or jazz performances from the past decades. Numbers such as the festive folk dance Moth Across and the surreal musixbox of Turn the Moon seem to do to rhythm what Object Holder had done to vocals: rediscover an archaic stereotype from the vintage viewpoint of the studio-based collage. And Antimagnet is pure rhythm made out of noise. Biota also includes a few more "songs", although the role of the voice has been greatly downplayed. It is frustrating that these fragments are abandoned after a minute or two, though.
The longer tracks are more satisfying. The eight-minute Proven Within Half Half a True Day achieves a higher degree of abstraction and chaos (demented vocals mixed with distorted accordion swirling in a maelstrom of unrecognizable). Winding Nth spends ten minutes doodling around dreamy folk and blues guitar accents and achieving a sort of nonchalant transcendence. The suspense of the Indian raga also permeates the 14-minute Passerine that slowly turns into a sleepy blues jam. It then revives following the lulling lead of an accordion.
This is another highly musical achievement by Biota, and one that synthesizes their "discoveries" of the last decade.

Cape Flyaway (ReR, 2012) featured William Sharp (here on electronics and mixing) Kristianne Gale (voice, guitar), Gordon Whitlow (organ, accordion), Tom Katsimpalis (guitars, clavioline), Mark Piersel (guitars), David Zekman (violin, mandolin), Larry Wilson (percussion), Steve Scholbe (rubab, guitar), James Gardner (trumpet), Randy Yeates (keyboards), Charles O'Meara (piano) and Randy Miotke (Rhodes, accordion).

Biota's Funnel To A Thread (ReR, 2014), featuring Bill Sharp, Gordon Whitlow, Tom Katsimpalis, Larry Wilson, Charles O'Meara, Mark Piersel, Randy Yeates, James Gardner, Kristianne Gale, Randy Miotke, and Dave Zekman, was composed over five years.

Biota's Fragment Of Balance (ReR, 2019) contains 26 brief pieces performed by Mark Piersel (guitars), Larry Wilson (drums), Tom Katsimpalis (guitars, bass and claviola), James Gardner and William Sharp (electronics), Randy Miotke (guitar, trumpet, flugelhorn, clarinet, electronics), Randy Yeates (keyboards), Gordon Whitlow (organ, accordion), Charles O'Meara (piano), David Zekman (violin, banjolin) and Kristianne Gale (voice, acoustic guitar).

Biota's Measured Not Found was recorded between 2012 and 2025.