First album in a goddamn age from this amazing enigmatic/ US experimental cell: five years in the making, Cape Flyaway is a stunning, dense, avant/orchestral re-imaging of UK folk music as a form of complex studio-birthed psychedelia that confuses timelines while summoning the ghostly stylings of June Tabor, Sandy Denny, Christy Moore, Judy Collins and Bert Jansch via sleight-of-hand tape work and backwards alchemy. Biota and their visual art wing/original incarnation Mnemonists are a long-running American collective that combine improvisation, tape work and complex arrangements of vocals, guitar, organ, accordion, clavioline, violin, mandolin, percussion, trumpet, keyboards, piano, accordion and electronics in order to birth settings that are both hermetically dizzying and beautifully open-ended. As the voices of Denny, Tabor and co rise from the music like ghosts the group bring in odd contradictory rhythms and spectral weaves of strings and horns that at points come over like an avant classical imagining of the music of Sun City Girls, Linda Perhacs and Maher Shalal Hash Baz but with a delicate, spectral logic that feels like a pre-industrial Faust Tapes. This is a stunning reimagining of UK folk forms that re-thinks the music as part of a constantly fluxing continuum rather than a historical fact and it hands you your ass on a plate in a way that alla these wretched Fairport Convention-fixated ‘folk rock’ tribute groups never will. Beguiling, hypnotic, sounds like approximately nothing else: another massive slice of outside from this legendary outfit – highly recommended.