Collection: Natural Information Society

Joshua Abrams busked on the streets of Philadelphia as an original member of The Roots, performed in a chamber group conducted by composer Earle Brown, moved to Chicago in 1991, and spent fifteen years as a house bassist at Fred Anderson's Velvet Lounge and at weekly club dates with Tortoise's Jeff Parker before forming Natural Information Society in 2010. The instrument at the centre of NIS is the guimbri, a three-string bass lute from Morocco's Gnawa people, which Abrams began playing after a late-1990s trip to Morocco. He describes it as the original 808: a percussive skin surface over a sub-bass tone that pulses rather than sustains, fundamentally rhythmic in a way the double bass is not. Around that instrument he has built a rotating ensemble whose core members, Lisa Alvarado on harmonium, Mikel Patrick Avery on drums and Jason Stein on bass clarinet, provide the framework for a practice built on long-form modal improvisation, repeated melodic figures building over extended durations into something that functions less like a jazz performance and more like a collective state. Hamid Drake, Ben Lamar Gay, Nick Mazzarella, Jeff Parker, Evan Parker and Ben Boye have all appeared across the catalogue. Their music has been described as ecstatic minimalism, psychedelic trance music, and a Mali edition of Terry Riley's "In C." All three descriptions get at something the music actually does.