After a decade long wait, the widely celebrated collaborative partnership of Natural Information Society and Bitchin Bajas - two of the great beacons within Chicago’s endlessly groundbreaking music scene - return to Drag City with “Totality”, a slow paced sonic wonder weaving shimmering ambiences with ecstatic ritualism as it arcs and transforms across its hypnotically engrossing two sides.

Founded in 1989, with more than three decades of remarkable work behind them, the Chicago based imprint, Drag City, will likely always be regarded through the lens of its efforts to help redefine the landscape of underground music during the 90s and 2000s, with artists and bands like Bill Callahan, Will Oldham, Silver Jews, Gastr del Sol, Royal Trux, and The Dirty Three. As ambitious, remarkable, and singular as the music that dominated the Drag City catalog is, there has always been a wilder thread rumbling in: more experimental, groundbreaking works that tend to even further defy categorization. In recent years, via releases by Arnold Dreyblatt, Jim O’Rourke, David Grubbs, Rafael Toral, Ghosted, Chris Corsano, Xylouris White, Tashi Dorji, Tim Barnes, François J. Bonnet & Stephen O'Malley, and numerous others, the more experimental side of the label has been leading the way. Their latest, “Totality”, the long awaited second collaboration between Natural Information Society and Bitchin Bajas. A “slow-burning suite of cosmic ambient ritualism - blending jazz, drone, and natural resonance into a radiant whole”, that brings out the best of each of these renowned projects, across four stunning tracks the septet weaves a shimmering sense of warmth in the perfect soundtrack for Spring’s transition into the summer months.

Natural Information Society and Bitchin Bajas represent a twin axis of the contemporary Chicago scene, each respectively, for a decade and a half, having created startling hybrids that draw upon their city’s singular history of jazz, post-rock, and experimental music. Natural Information Society was founded in 2010 by the multi-instrumentalist and composer Joshua Abrams, who first emerged into the broader consciousness during the mid 1990s as a member of the groundbreaking ensemble, Town & Country, with Ben Vida, Liz Payne, Jim Dorling, playing as the house bass player at Fred Anderson's Velvet Lounge - arguably the most distinguished free jazz venue in the city - as well as playing with Tortoise, Hamid Drake, Sam Prekop, David Grubbs, Brokeback, and countless others. Despite his already remarkable contributions to the landscape of music, it has arguably been through leading Natural Information Society - a rotating cast of regular and irregular players that, in this incarnation, includes Abrams on double bass and guimbri, Lisa Alvarado on harmonium, Mikel Patrick Avery on drums and percussion, and Jason Stein on bass clarinet - that Abrams has found his distinguished voice. Through five full-lengths and truly engrossing, hypnotic live performances, the project has become one of the most celebrated bands today, claiming fans in nearly every corner of the globe.

Similarly, Bitchin Bajas, since its founding in 2010 by Cooper Crain (Organ and Synth), alongside Daniel Quinlivan on electronics, and Rob Frye on flute and synths, have been a hugely celebrated project on the global scene. Incredibly prolific and always defying easy categorization, across more than a dozen full-lengths, as well as noteworthy collaborations with Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Olivia Wyatt, the trio developed a singular and often playful sensibility that blends jazz, minimalism, kosmische, electroacoustic ambient music into languid, slow moving bodies of sonority that continuously nod into the history of music via albums like Switched On Ra which joyously reference, in equal parts, Wendy Carlos and Sun Ra.

Back in 2015, Natural Information Society and Bitchin Bajas - two ensembles rooted in deep listening and sonic communion - joined forces and issued the stunning LP, “Automaginary”, which became one of the most widely celebrated albums in both bands’ catalogs. A decade down the road, they’ve finally gotten back to their brilliant collaboration with “Totality”, which takes it up a heavy notch from where they left off. Comprising four tracks - “Totality”, “Nothing Does Not Show”, “Always 9 Seconds Away”, and “Clock No Clock” - across the album’s two sides, “Totality” is divided conceptually into the themes of space and time, and is positioned as “less of a narrative and more a field of perception”. Remarkably, even without these clues to the creative underpinnings guiding the LP, the evolutions of sensations it yields make them hard to miss. The majority of the first side is taken up with the ethereal, shimmering meanderings of the album’s self-titled opener, an ambient electroacoustic excursion that glacially shifts and folds before morphing into “Nothing Does Not Show”, encountering a similar form of extraterrestrial otherworldliness threaded by driving bass rhythms that take the energy ever so slightly up a notch.

As the second side kicks into action, gamelan-like rhythms pulse beneath droning harmoniums, synthesizers arc in slow motions - providing a more earthy touch - that slowly pick up the pace as the septet’s repetitive motions and cycles progress, becoming more rhythmic and hypnotic as it goes before eventually arriving at the ecstatic zones for which both Natural Information Society and Bitchin Bajas have become widely known and celebrated in their previous recordings and live sets.

Vibrating with the natural rhythm of breath and motion, “Totality”, the long-awaited reconvening of Natural Information Society and Bitchin Bajas works like a slow fire, blending the elements between the cosmos and the blurring of time: “a convergence of ecologies, tuning the body and the earth in the same gesture”. Completely engrossing in the most understated of ways, working in the calming tension of sonic waves, after ten years of waiting for the return of this collaboration, “Totality” doesn’t disappoint.