Building upon his groundbreaking activities leading Natural Information Society, while also forging toward new sonic and conceptual realms, Chicago musical heavyweight and mainstay, Joshua Abrams, returns to Drag City with his first solo outing in a number of years: Music for Pulse Meridian Foliation. Scored for two violas, harmonium, and electronics, this remarkable work was conceived as the immersive sonic component to an installation and exhibition by fellow NIS member Lisa Alvarado in 2023, taking on many of its multidimensional ideas within its incredible constellation of engrossing sounds that culminated as one of our favourite releases of the year so far.

In recent years, the Chicago based multi-instrumentalist and composer, Joshua Abrams, has occupied a near constant place in our consciousness, leading his incredible ensemble, Natural Information Society, delivering a steady stream of hypnotic and creatively ambitious releases and live performances that entirely captivate the heart, body, and mind. While there's good reason for all of the attention that Abrams’ efforts in NIS have received, the project only captures a small dimension of the scope that he pursues as an artist. His roots run deep, stretching across more than three decades of activity, spanning numerous disciplines: jazz, experimental composition, post-rock, and beyond. Over the last few years, we’ve been catching sight of Abrams more regularly in a variety of collaborative combinations, but it’s been a while since he’s delivered a strictly solo endeavor, something that the always incredible imprint, Drag City, now rectifies with the release of ‘Music for Pulse Meridian Foliation’. Meticulously remixed down to two channels, placing the sonic material into a distinct dialog, the immersion within the album’s pulsing and sustained tones further illuminates Abrams’ remarkable capacity as an artist, offering a profound immersion, rooted in minimalist constraint and highly attuned attentiveness to the many dimensions of the self that organized sonority can activate and provoke.

Few figures have left as enduring a mark on Chicago’s incredible musical landscape and culture as Joshua Abrams. First emerging into the broader consciousness during the mid 1990s as a member of the groundbreaking ensemble, Town & Country, alongside Ben Vida, Liz Payne, and Jim Dorling, Abrams - as he has remained ever since - wasn’t an artist to be easily nailed down. During that same period, he worked as the house bass player at Fred Anderson's Velvet Lounge - arguably the most distinguished free jazz venue in the city - and played with Tortoise, Hamid Drake, Sam Prekop, David Grubbs, Brokeback, and countless others. Yet, even here - despite his close alignment with free jazz and post-rock royalty - Abrams’ activities and range refuse easy location beyond being possessed by a towering degree of creative ambition. The records he’s contributed to now number well past a hundred, covering a vast range of expressions, from The Roots to Loren Connors & Alan Licht, from Godspeed You! Black Emperor to Rhys Chatham, and from Roscoe Mitchell to Joan of Arc, which only begins to scratch the surface. This doesn’t even begin to address his efforts within Natural Information Society, the ensemble which he has led for more than 15 years and for which he is arguably most famed.

Despite the vast constellation of records that Abrams has played on and made, his discography as a solo artist remains comparatively small, carefully created across spacious intervals over the years. Time having once again passed, his latest, ‘Music for Pulse Meridian Foliation’, issued by Drag City, is arguably well overdue. Stretching over two sides of a single LP, featuring James Sanders on violas, Lisa Alvarado on harmonium, and Abrams on electronics, ‘Music for Pulse Meridian Foliation’ was originally created as a 4-channel installation to accompany an exhibition of Alvarado’s artworks - mural, double‑sided paintings, and photographs - staged at Los Angeles’ REDCAT in 2023. While much of the composer and multi-instrumentalist’s solo efforts in the past have forged toward highly distinct and free-standing sonic explorations, and this is no exception, the album bears a clear relationship to his efforts in Natural Information Society - sculpting a hypnotic, immersive sense of interplay - in ways that might be regarded as rare within his output. However, where ‘Music for Pulse Meridian Foliation’ is distinct from NIS is that the act of writing was in strict dialogue with the exhibit, responding with choices in composition, performance and production, rather than the form of the music being occupied by the ensemble of players.

While the sounds of ‘Music for Pulse Meridian Foliation’ are remarkably seductive and immersive - a stunning constellation of rich, long-tones, glissando, and complex intersections of texture and harmonics - the piece also manifests a fascinating internalization of the multidimensional ideas enacted by Alvarado’s exhibition: enacting a “process of foliation, in which extreme environmental pressures upon rocks evoke a new crystallization and a changed minerality” which acts as a metaphor for the politics of change as they connect to “her family’s intergenerational memory of “Mexican Repatriation”, a 1930s US policy that pushed millions across the border into Mexico”. Abrams’ ‘Music For Pulse Meridian Foliation’ is the aural manifestation of an art event described as “an in- between space and access point to a pulsating experience that connects body and land.”

The piece’s slow moving evolutions and forward movements, voiced around the two violas - intertwining from opposing points within the sound stage - that operate in close dialog and often unified the complement of harmonium tones and electronic interventions, collectively creating a startlingly conceptual music when understood within the context for which they were conceived: topical, deeply political, while also entirely physical and embodied. As such, Abrams manifests a distinctly new form of Minimalism, incorporating the reference points of numerous cultures and historical moments, while remaining entirely rooted in the concerns of our own era.

Simply put, ‘Music for Pulse Meridian Foliation’ is absolutely stunning, intoxicating the heart, body, and ear with its sense of composition and restraint, alongside the deeply compelling interactions of its sonic elements, while also managing to challenge the mind with the ideas that rumble at its core.