One of the most engaging and creative projects to have found its way to my ears, Measured Not Found, from the visual/musical collective Biota, invites listeners to travel across time and space on a trip of their imagination’s making.

Biota
Measured Not Found (Recommended Records [UK])
A review
A few times over the years, Kristina Jacobsen, PhD, associate professor of ethnomusicology and anthropology at the University of New Mexico, has kindly asked me to speak to her students about the art of writing a music review. To do this required that I figure out exactly what it is that I do and how I do it. After some thoughtful percolation, I came to the conclusion that writing a music review is very like writing a travel review. Where did you go? What did you encounter? How did you feel about it? What did you learn about the place, and what did the place teach you about yourself? What were the most salient experiences you had there? Etc. Both music and more concrete modes of travel—cars, planes, trains, ships, skis, flippers, boots, etc.—carry you to someplace other than where you were.

The music of Biota—an indefatigably creative visual/musical collective centered in Fort Collins, Colorado, with contributors spread across the globe, that has been producing extraordinary work for about 45 years—is perhaps the ultimate confirmation of that approach. It seems to exist solely for the purpose of taking the listener to a fascinating someplace other via the conveyance of the listener’s imagination.

Their most recent release, Measured Not Found, does exactly that. It presents a soundscape that employs what William Sharp, one of the founding members, identified in a phone interview as “traditionally unrelated artistic approaches.” That’s putting it mildly. The instrumentation ranges from the rubab, a 10th-century lutelike instrument from Afghanistan, to bent circuits, metal pipe, and the biomellodrone, an electronic drone/effects keyboard created by Randy Yeats, one of Biota’s members, along with a wide collection of more familiar instruments. Fourteen contributors account for 48 different instruments and tasks. Much of the music is composed by Biota, but they also employ—and electronically manipulate—source material that ranges from traditional English folk tunes to Lead Belly’s blues to contemporary orchestral compositions. What’s more, with 45 years’ worth of archived recordings, the group has a trove of material to draw from, in addition to what they have recently composed, manipulated, and recorded. (The material used on Measured Not Found was recorded between 2012 and 2025.)

Biota freely layers or links music from distinctly different cultures, geographies, genres, and eras—much the way a painter might mix, match, and merge the colors on their palette—to create a deep, expansive, and unpredictable musical landscape. It sometimes sounds as if a previous century or two had inadvertently wandered into a 21st-century American recording studio and stayed for a moment, astonished.

For example, the track “Little Water,” which uses Lead Belly’s “Bring Me a Little Water, Silvey” as source material, opens with a country blues acoustic guitar, which is soon joined by an accordion that, although an instrument in Leadbelly’s arsenal, is played in a distinctly different musical style. They are soon joined by strings, electronics, and a variety of other contemporary instruments and manipulations and the vocal of Kristianne Gale that both deepen and expand the feeling of the original.

The ripe emotional content of the music reflects and elicits wonder, fear, anxiety, relief, jealousy, melancholy—in short, a broad range of human feeling. In places, the listener might feel themself afloat over the soundscape in a hot-air balloon, as on “New Air,” and elsewhere find themself dropped into it, as on “Land of Dust and Rain.”

Biota thinks of the 26-track album as a single composition, says Sharp, comprising several sections, which are sequenced in a way that reflects the free-form radio backgrounds of both Sharp and another member, Gordon Whitlow (he of Sorry for Laughing, a cousin to Biota). The tracks are as short as 34 seconds—the shorter tracks often function as transitional pieces—and as long as 4 minutes 52 seconds, with most hovering to one side or the other of 2 minutes.

A narrative threads through the album, and Sharp says that it was developed intuitively by the group in the course of the recording. However, he also notes that the album is wide open for the listener’s interpretation, depending on how they meet the music. “It’s intention is to pull the listener in, but the listener would presumably be bringing a lot of their own personal experiences and daily life to this because it’s moving through environments, and it’s moving through periods of time,” he says.

The album begins with “A Gravel Road to Secrecy,” a track that sounds as if the listener is walking into a chamber music concert already in progress. It ends with the Appalachian folk tune “Come All You Fair and Tender Ladies,” which laments the falseness of men. Between secrecy and falsehood lies the heart of the album in this listener’s estimation, though the album’s title remains a mystery.

In addition to the music, the sumptuously appointed and meticulously notated CD package is itself a work of art, with 18 Biota members credited with 30 colorful images in a wide variety of styles—like the music.

The album is available from Bandcamp, ReR Megacorp (UK), Amazon, and in the U.S., from several mail-order companies: Wayside Music (Washington, DC), Squidco (Wilmington, NC), and Re Be Xibalba (Seattle, WA).

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