CD Edition - Fifteen years in, Joshua Abrams and his Natural Information Society have stopped trying to impress anyone and started building something genuinely necessary. Perseverance Flow strips away the expanded lineups of recent efforts, returning to the core quartet—Lisa Alvarado on harmonium, Mikel Patrick Avery on drums, Jason Stein on bass clarinet, and Abrams on guimbri—for one continuous 37-minute meditation that feels less like composed music than a natural phenomenon you've stumbled upon.

This isn't the polite minimalism of academic composers or the aggressive repetition of post-rock bands. It's something more elusive: music that has learned to breathe at its own pace, drawing equally from Coltrane's modal investigations and Chicago house's hypnotic pulse, all filtered through what Abrams calls "skipping rope in slo-mo." The ensemble spent a year performing this single piece before entering Electrical Audio Studios at 11 AM and finishing in time for school pickup—the kind of casual mastery that only emerges from complete immersion.

What makes Perseverance Flow remarkable isn't just the playing (though Stein's bass clarinet work alone justifies the price of admission), but how studio manipulation becomes compositional tool rather than cosmetic afterthought. Working with engineer Greg Norman, they've created what Abrams imagines as "a live extended realization of a Jaylib lost instrumental as remixed by Kevin Shields"—an impossible hybrid that somehow makes perfect sense once you hear it.

The result occupies its own sonic territory: too structured for free improvisation, too organic for minimalist composition, too patient for jazz, too complex for ambient. It's music that has found its own ecosystem and learned to thrive there, offering what The Wire aptly called "energetically nutritious supernatural information society." In times when music often functions as either stimulant or sedative, Perseverance Flow proposes a third option: music as medicine, console, and quiet revolution rolled into one.

Natural Information Society has always operated on its own timeline. With Perseverance Flow, they've created music that exists outside time entirely—a 37-minute eternity that reveals new dimensions with each return visit. Essential listening for anyone who believes music can still surprise us.