by Álvaro Molina (@alvaromolinare)
“Being from the West, we don’t have an exact tradition of how our music affects people, but we aim to produce a space of slowness and flow that acts as counterbalance to the pace and short attention span of contemporary technological society,” said Joshua Abrams to musicwork magazine in 2015. The restless founder and leader of Natural Information Society (NIS), one of Chicago’s most celebrated avant-garde outfits since its inception in 2010, is a naturalist in music. His career is as colourful as the album cover art painted by Lisa Alvarado, his partner and bandmate at NIS. Abrams, a multi instrumentalist focused on bass guitar, served in Philadelphia in The Roots’ early hip-hop experimentations with organic and electronic elements. After moving to Chicago in the early 90s, he found new roads in the Windy City’s vast and rich music scene, playing in Tortoise’s droning post-rock and the chamber avant-jazz of Town and Country.
The communal celebration of music as a living, breathing medium and a method of stretching, even escaping time, came with Natural Information Society, the ensemble of thrilling minimalism where sounds grow gently in a lush garden of polyrhythms and harmonies. Having released compelling albums such as the impressionistic Mandatory Reality or Descension (Out of Our Constrictions), a 75-minute live improvisation with veteran avant-garde saxophonist Evan Parker, now NIS appears with a new chapter of its ever-expanding incarnations with Since Time Is Gravity, their third album released via mind-bending jazz specialist label Eremite Records.
Joining the core lineup of Abrams (guimbri / bass), Alvarado (harmonium), Mikel Patrick Avery (percussion) and Jason Stein (bass clarinet) are Hamid Drake (drums), Josh Berman and Ben Lamar Gay (cornets), Nick Mazzarella and Mai Sugimoto (alto saxophones and flute), Kara Bershad (harp) and Ari Brown, one of Chicago’s finest tenor saxophonists, an original member of the city’s visionary Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in the 1970s and bandmate of legendary musicians like Anthony Braxton or McCoy Tyner.
This enhanced lineup of musicians attacks with four core compositions - the opening “Moontide Chorus,” “Is,” “Stigmergy,” and the closing “Gravity” - each forming a silk road of abstract and exotic influences ranging, mainly, from the hypnotic healing music of North Africa’s Gnawa people, third stream jazz watered by Don Cherry’s Organic Music Society and a sweetly oppressive minimalism of repetition, drone and Oriental psychedelic delicacies. Weaved in between is Ari Brown’s elated saxophone, which soares like a prayer in a wild ritual and devotes itself to a naturalist, yet uncanny and mystical sound, as it transforms and stretches time, losing all track of its passing.
As a collective, NIS encompasses a lively, pulsating experience, coming from every instrumental angle. The “slowness” and “flow” of Abram’s visionary leadership expands into every corner of the seven compositions included on Since Time Is Gravity. “I aim to create compositions and arrange environments that highlight the instrument’s strengths in new contexts,” he said in the same musicwork piece previously quoted.
Front and center, thus, is the guembri, the driving force throughout most of the music on the album. A camel hide-covered lute, it’s an essential instrument for the ecstatic music of the Gnawa people and the Jemaa El Fna street musicians in Marrakech. Its percussive sound finds different grounds within Abrams’ playing. He acquired the instrument during a 1998 trip to Morocco, expanding its mostly ceremonial and ritual usage into a profane - in a strictly religious way - thrust of Western psychedelia informed by non-Western styles, as in “Murmuration,” an epic eighteen minute suite of pastoral harmonies that closes the first act of Since Time is Gravity.
In their longform approach for releasing music, NIS has crafted a unique world of its own. Beyond music, the albums also have a kind of visual reverberation, created by Lisa Alvarado’s enigmatic, almost symbolic paintings. “Vibratory Cartography: Nepantla,” the one on the cover of Since Time Is Gravity, is a window to much of the music included inside: asymmetric sounds, repetition in shapes and forms and a concern for color - both in its plastic and auditory sense - as a way of showing new contexts. Here, music flows by itself. Slowly or rapidly, it has its own gravity, allowing for much more than time as we know it.