Natural Information Society & Bitchin Bajas - Totality (2025 Drag City Vinyl LP)

Natural Information Society & Bitchin Bajas - Totality | Vinyl LP - 2025 Drag City (DC860, embossed cover)

Natural Information Society is the Chicago group led by the bassist and composer Joshua Abrams, whose music is built on the guimbri, the three-stringed bass lute of Moroccan Gnawa music, and on patient repetition: hypnotic, trance-like jazz that turns a single figure over and over until it opens up. Bitchin Bajas are a Chicago trio led by Cooper Crain, dealing in analog synthesisers, flutes and kosmische drone. The two groups first joined forces on Automaginary in 2015, and Totality is the reunion. Over four long pieces they lock the guimbri, Lisa Alvarado's harmonium, Jason Stein's bass clarinet and Rob Frye's flute into slow, cyclical grooves, Cooper Crain's synths and organ glowing underneath. It was recorded at Steve Albini's Electrical Audio and mastered by Rashad Becker, and it sounds like it: warm, deep and physical. This is meditative music with real weight, closer to minimalism and Gnawa trance than to any conventional idea of jazz.

It arrived to some of the warmest notices of 2025, turning up on plenty of year-end lists, the kind of record people describe as a reason to bother with vinyl at all. It sits in the same broad world as the Chicago experimental scene and the wider revival of hypnotic, spiritual-minded jazz.