Hot on the heels of ‘Totality’, their brilliant collaboration with Bitchin Bajas earlier this year, Natural Information Society returns with ‘Perseverance Flow’, arguably their most explicitly experimental full-length to date.

While experimental music has always been guided by singular voices and names, in recent years, larger ensembles and bands - working collectively toward the types of groundbreaking visions that are only obtainable through collaboration - have begun to occupy a greater presence within the cultural consciousness. Many of the most interesting and striking of these - Ghosted, The Necks, France, 75 Dollar Bill, Water Damage, Bitterviper, Tanz Mein Herz, etc. - are noted for weaving startling, hypnotic hybrid forms from a vast number of touchstones, guided by decidedly experimental approaches. Among this constellation of remarkable projects, few have shone as brightly as the long-standing Chicago based ensemble Natural Information Society. Led by Joshua Abrams for nearly 15 years, the project has rendered intoxicating sounds across a steady stream of full-lengths on Eremite Records, as well as producing equally noteworthy collaborations with Evan Parker, Ari Brown, William Parker, and Bitchin Bajas. Now, two years on from the stunning highs of ‘Since Time Is Gravity’ (made with Ari Brown) and less than a year from ‘Totality’ (made with Bitchin Bajas), Natural Information Society return with ‘Perseverance Flow’, encapsulating their most radical rethinking of collaboration to date. Absolutely stunning from the first sounding to the last - the core quartet rendering the heavy grooves and blistering textures we’ve come to know and love from NIS - while pushing toward ambitious new ground that renders an endlessly rewarding sense of surprise, ‘Perseverance Flow’ breathes with a fiery pulse of life, and serves as a potent reminder of the power of collaborating and communing through sound.

Natural Information Society was founded in 2010 by the multi-instrumentalist and composer Joshua Abrams: a longstanding fixture within Chicago’s rich musical culture. Abrams first emerged into the broader consciousness during the mid 1990s as a member of the groundbreaking ensemble, Town & Country, with Ben Vida, Liz Payne, and Jim Dorling, a period during which he was also working as the house bass player at Fred Anderson's Velvet Lounge - arguably the most distinguished free jazz venue in the city - and playing with Tortoise, Hamid Drake, Sam Prekop, David Grubbs, Brokeback, and countless others. Despite his many remarkable contributions to the landscape of contemporary music, it has arguably been through leading Natural Information Society - a rotating cast of regular and irregular players that, in its current 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. Across their previous seven full-lengths - plus two jointly billed with their fellow Chicagoans, Bitchin Bajas - all drawing upon their city’s incredible history of jazz, post-rock, and experimental music, coupled with their truly engrossing, hypnotic live performances, the project has become one of the most celebrated bands working today, claiming fans in nearly every corner of the globe.

Building upon, and distilling, Natural Information Society’s enduring sonic explorations over the last fifteen years, the group’s latest full-length outing, ‘Perseverance Flow’, finds them returning to their core quartette line-up of Abrams, Alvarado, Avery, and Stein, collectively embracing what might be considered their most experimental approach to collaboration to date. Following more than a year performing ‘Perseverance Flow’ in live contexts, when embarking upon recording the piece at Electrical Audio Studios in Chicago - similar to Martin Swope’s live tape treatments within Mission of Burma during the late 1970s, as well as a long history of dub production - Abrams enlisted the engineer, Greg Norman, to manipulate the band’s sounds in real time - mutating timbre and textures - engaging the studio as an actor in its own right. Abrams states that he imagines the outcomes as "like a live extended realization of a Jaylib lost instrumental as remixed by Kevin Shields”. While the immediate sonic image such a description renders is likely far from what we’ve come to expect from Natural Information Society, the outcome is as solidly aligned with their signature sound as anything before; seeding modal jazz with hypnotic, North African Gnawa references, as well as numerous others from across the globe, post-rock wonk, and the long-standing relationship to experimental music from which they’ve always drawn.

With Abrams, Alvarado, Avery, and Stein, tight, chugging, and locked in across the 37 minutes of ‘Perseverance Flow’, the emerging body of music ebbs and flows as Norman’s interventions push deep into the heart of the music, distorting and reshaping their sounds, as though they were swinging within a forceful tide, subtly bent and conformed to its will, or as Abrams describes it, like: "skipping rope in slo-mo - a dance of cooperation to rally guts and humors and keep marching through pouring tears." Hugely ambitious, feeling as creatively challenging as it is hypnotically intoxicating, driven by a pulse that feels more aligned with the bio-rhythms of the human body than standard musical time, with each return listen ‘Perseverance Flow’ further presents itself as one of the band’s most striking and deeply engaging records to date.

Refracting Natural Information Society’s signature polyrhythmic sensibilities through dub's spatial possibilities, creating what Abrams calls "a destruction myth and a creation myth of a soundworld together at once”, ‘Perseverance Flow’ is a boundary breaking marvel on numerous fronts, finding the quartet, as ever, pushing toward new ground and taking us along for the ride. Much like jazz and dub - the idioms toward which it most heavily nods - it serves as a potent reminder that joyous and inviting music can also render challenges to what we know and expect. ‘Perseverance Flow’ taps the soul and spins around the heart and mind.