This is the most comprehensive collection ever released by The Real Thing. Featuring songs that they recorded for EMI, Pye Records, RCA, Jive Records as well as a few tracks released on a couple of independent labels compiled together on one compilation for the first time.
Without any obvious keystone event, Biota – who started recording in the late 1970’s as the Mnemonist Orchestra – have quietly become a musical fixture, honoured for their uniquely, abstract, layered, polystylistic approach to musical construction - deaf to fashion or possible sales. And it seems, paradoxically, to have been just this art-orientated commercial indifference that has slowly won them loyal followers and surprisingly respectable sales. Now, for a wider audience - and at a congenial price - 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.
On their best album, this fascinating “philosophy jam band” begins with indie rock touchstones and then explores the fringes of those ideas.