Formed 2010

Natural Information Society is a Chicago ensemble led by composer and multi-instrumentalist Joshua Abrams, built around his playing of the guimbri, a three-string North African bass lute from Morocco's Gnawa people that Abrams began learning after a late-1990s trip to Morocco. Abrams grew up in Philadelphia, busked on the streets there as an original member of The Roots, performed in a chamber group conducted by composer Earle Brown, and moved to Chicago in 1991, where he became a house bassist at Fred Anderson's Velvet Lounge and a key figure in the city's creative music community for fifteen years before forming NIS in 2010. The core ensemble consists of Abrams on guimbri and bass, Lisa Alvarado on harmonium, Mikel Patrick Avery on drums and Jason Stein on bass clarinet; frequent collaborators have included Hamid Drake, Ben Lamar Gay, Nick Mazzarella, Jeff Parker and Evan Parker. NIS's practice is built on long-form modal improvisation: extended pieces in which repeated melodic figures, drone harmonics and polyrhythmic layering accumulate over durations of twenty minutes or more into what the group's own description calls "long-form psychedelic environments informed by jazz, minimalism and traditional musics."