For most of Bitchin Bajas’ 15-year discography, the trio has adhered to the Oblique Strategies aphorism, “Repetition is a form of change.” Cooper Crain, Rob Frye, and Dan Quinlivan would fire up their keyboards, lock into an iridescent loop, and explore all of its hypnotic possibilities. As they committed the passage to muscle memory, inevitable shifts would happen—nudge a rhythm here, tweak the resonance there—and what started as a pleasant few seconds of analog synthesizer tones and breathy flute notes became a wormhole, a way to experience the passing of time in a state of suspended animation.
But a seed was planted in 2017, when, on the expansive double album Bajas Fresh, the band covered “Angels and Demons at Play,” a Sun Ra tune from the 1960 record of the same name. The distance between a cosmically minded, psychedelic synth outfit and a cosmically minded, psychedelic jazz ensemble is shorter than you think. And given the Bajas’ place in the middle of Chicago’s jazz and experimental Venn diagram, their version felt like a natural, inevitable evolution. “Angels and Demons at Play” opened the Bajas’ methodology, allowing a more developed melodic sense to emerge from their cascading zone-outs. It portended their next moves: While waiting for 2022’s Bajascillators vinyl pressings, the Bajas expanded on the idea on Switched on Ra, choosing eight more Sun Ra compositions to interpret. Earlier this year, the group reunited with fellow Chicago travelers Natural Information Society for Totality, a gorgeous collaborative record that evoked Bennie Maupin’s The Jewel in the Lotus, if Cluster had made it.
Heady and daydreamy, the Bajas’ latest album, Inland See, benefits significantly from this new, somewhat looser approach. On past records, the band fit sequences together like horologists painstakingly tweezering the gears of a clock, letting the spellbinding mechanics run for a small eternity. Here, the trio zooms out a bit, repeating entire phrases instead of small arpeggiated figures, giving these four tracks a more songwriterly feel. Peaks and valleys take the place of constant expansion. The songs still swirl together into billowing masses, full of slow-cycling envelopes and acutely arranged bleeps and bloops, but it’s more like watching cumulus clouds change shape than an ever-thickening brume. For perhaps the first time in the Bajas’ catalog, there are parts of Inland See that can get stuck in your head.
The opener, “Skylarking,” immediately telegraphs this new direction. Its lightly churning two-chord vamp feels loose and off the cuff, and as organ and saxophone take turns soloing, you can be deceived into thinking you’ve dropped in on some languorous afternoon jam session. Lean in closer and you’ll notice a carefully thought-through arrangement and slight but impactful production tics. Hard-panned flutes appear halfway through as if demarcating a chorus, then return near the end to bolster the pulse as layers of squiggling instrumentation pile on top of each other. Four minutes in, the kick drum, which has so far anchored the pleasantly wafting sonics, drops out at the end of a measure as the sax comes back in, signaling a shift in momentum as the song pushes to its conclusion. It’s all very subtle, but these moments signify an ensemble newly interested in tension and release to induce altered states rather than the brain-warping pace of perpetual forward motion.
The electronic webbing that was the focal point of songs like “Jammu,” from Bajas Fresh, or “Amorpha,” from Bajascillators, gets pushed into the background on Inland See, creating a shimmering, atmospheric noise floor. On “Reno,” all the synth gurgles and pings create space for the repeated melody to swell into, like swarms of fireflies illuminating unexplored parts of a forest. As the piano, saxophone, and triangle waves that overlap on the theme all begin to fade out, you realize how many sounds are happening at once, how massive the song truly is. Even the most legato moments, like the eight-and-a-half-minute “Keiji Dreams,” or the beginning of “Skylarking,” feel roomier, like the intervals of a chord curiously circling each other, interested to learn how they fit together.
The band typically shows its true power when allowing runtimes to extend past 10 minutes, and album closer “Graut,” a sidelong stunner that morphs drastically over the course of its 18 minutes, is another addition to its pantheon of longform blissouts. It starts as a continuation of the gaseous drift established during “Keiji Dreams,” a simple drum-machine pattern eventually straightening its spine into the kind of Teutonic kosmische workout that the Bajas excel at. But instead of letting its motorik pulse hit bedrock, they begin to bend the groove, introducing swing little by little. It’s the most playful the Bajas have ever seemed; by the time the song reaches the two-thirds mark, “Graut” has landed on a vibe that’s part new age, part ’90s R&B, a slight departure that marks wholly new territory for the Bajas. The band wrote most of this material onstage while touring in support of Bajascillators, so when they gathered at Electric Audio to put the new songs to tape, their ideas had revealed new contours through constant repetition and refinement. This is the Bitchin Bajas ethos: Every idea is a piece of the infinite; there is enough depth in a single moment to provide a lifetime of surprises.
