Perpetually glazed drone trio Bitchin Bajas and minimalist polyrhythm factory Natural Information Society have once again burbled up from the neon miasma where the cosmos meets your Discogs want list. Totality, an expansive, blissful 43-minute slow boat of nü-kosmische and minimalist rock, comes nearly 10 years after their last full-length collaboration, 2015’s Autoimaginary. That album imagined the charged meeting between Terry Riley (circa 1964) and Terry Riley (circa 1969): The Bajas’ new-age synth gush and fluttering flutes paved the Curved Rainbow Road, Natural Info Society steadily driving their drums, harmonium, and Moroccan guimbri down the autobahn. In matching up the tangerine dreamers in the former group and the dream syndicate outsiders in the latter, it would be a challenge to not produce something beautiful. The two bands are deeply steeped in the Chicago experimental music community, enthralled by 20th-century minimalism and Sun Ra, constantly aiming for ecstatic peaks, and willing to ride a wavelength indefinitely.
Naturally, their second album together delivers all their gorgeous hallmarks—warm harmonium drone, weightless synths, and Möbius strips of low end courtesy of Natural Information Society leader Joshua Abrams. If you expect a little more this time around, it’s only because the bands have come so incredibly far individually in the last decade. Bitchin Bajas have consistently expanded their palette. Bajas Fresh, their 2017 career peak, sharpened their synths into diamonds of arpeggiated euphoria; the 2021 Sun Ra tribute Switched On Ra let them explore more amorphous and nocturnal zones; and 2022’s excellent Bajacillators updated their sound with the hyperreal blips of Laurie Spiegel’s Music Mouse software, sounding like a connection between the Berlin school and Japanese ambient. For their part, Natural Information Society have simply become one of best American rock bands going: a propulsive, celebratory dance act endlessly grooving somewhere on the perimeters of Afrobeat, avant-jazz, Gnawa music, and Steve Reich.
On Totality, NIS mostly deal in atmosphere and drama. Nearly 17 minutes long, the self-titled opener pulsates and throbs with specks of percussion and errant electronics, spiraling like dank, dazed, psychonautical jams in the vein of the Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star” or Black Sabbath’s “Planet Caravan.” Around the 12-minute mark, Abrams kicks into a lackadaisical 7/8 bassline and the track slowly morphs into a Jon Hassell-style dance under the moonlight. Side B sprawler “Always 9 Seconds Away” has a similarly sleepy crawl but plays like a doom-jazz version of the memory game Simon, its disjunctive melody growing like lichen.
The album finds its heights on the outliers, a pair of comparatively shorter tracks driven by NIS drummer Mikel Patrick Avery. The Harmonia vibes of “Nothing Does Not Show” are perfectly complemented by Avery’s percolating rhythms, giving some focus to the haze. Closer “Clock No Clock” is a true marvel of jazz-motorik, Avery bustling with percussive raindrops, building to a hectic (yet marvelously mellow) climax.
Another sublime slab from two bands seemingly incapable of making a bad record, Totality doesn’t really play to either bands’ strengths as of late. National Information Society mostly keep cool, instead of firing up a perpetual-motion machine for head-boggling grooves. Bitchin Bajas remain flame-keepers of the sphere where Teutonic poise meets new-age fuzzies, but here they act as patient collaborators instead of scene-stealing spacemen. Still, this seven-headed hydra of head music remains a great ambassador of vibes.
