Mnemonists

condition (record/cover): EX+ / EX+

Portfolio included.

One of the most radical American experimental records of the Eighties, and the culminating installment of what might be called the Mnemonists' trilogy (Horde, 1981; Biota, 1982; Gyromancy, 1984). The project was the Colorado collective led by Mark Derbyshire and William Sharp; on this record the full sextet included Amy Derbyshire, Karen Nakai, Mark Piersel, and Steve Scholbe.

The two long pieces ("Gyromancy A," "Gyromancy B") take their title from the archaic divination technique of drawing a circle and walking in or around it. Recorded in summer 1983 and released on Dys in 1984, the album is built entirely from acoustic instruments (piano, cello, electric guitar, double bass, viola, sitar, harpsichord, soprano shawm, bagpipes, clarinet, crumhorn, dulcian, cornett, trombone, voice, metronome, plus a percussion kit of bass drum, bodhrán, and side drum) fed through electronic processing to the point of total unrecognisability. Mark Derbyshire engineered the electronic treatments.

The texture sits between AMM, Organum, and Faust, occasionally touching the territory the Hafler Trio would map out with later Eighties work. The Mnemonist collective eventually reconfigured into Biota, which extended the method in a more composition-directed direction; Gyromancy is the Mnemonists identity in its final and most concentrated form, and a cornerstone of the 1984 American post-industrial year.