Natural Information Society - Perseverance Flow (2025)

Announcing Perseverance Flow, the latest album from acclaimed Chicago-based ensemble Natural Information Society (NIS). After a trilogy of double LPs by expanded manifestations of the band — beginning in 2018 with Mandatory Reality and continuing through Since Time Is Gravity (a Pitchfork Best Jazz & Experimental Album of the Year selection and Mojo’s #1 Underground Album of 2023) — NIS returns to its core formation: Lisa Alvarado on harmonium, Mikel Patrick Avery on drums, Jason Stein on bass clarinet, and composer/multi-instrumentalist Joshua Abrams on guimbri. Perseverance Flow presents one continuous 37-minute composition across a single LP.

As the rocket boosters on spaceship Earth sputter closer to burnout, lower your stylus into a soundfield that grows stronger the deeper you travel into it. Inside awaits a dose of the medicine many of us look to music to deliver. One of the deep contemplations of this natural information, as Bill Callahan notes, is the wide range of source materials Abrams draws from over the band’s more than 15-year history. Ideas from minimalism, modal jazz, and traditional musics are regularly reimagined in these compositions.

The 2021 double LP Descension (Out of Our Constrictions), featuring guest soloist Evan Parker, reflected aspects of Abrams’ love of party music, Chicago house, and John Coltrane. But even veteran travelers with NIS should brace themselves for Perseverance Flow. Speaking to the history and inspirations behind the album, Abrams offers:

“We played the piece for a year in concert before the recording. At Electrical Audio Studios in Chicago, we went in at 11 and were done in time to pick our kids up from school.”

He continues: “In a reference world, I imagine Perseverance Flow like a live extended realization of a Jaylib lost instrumental as remixed by Kevin Shields. Or vice versa. I also think it has sympathies to some of the more rhythmically intricate dance musics out of Chicago and Lisbon.”

The core NIS ensemble heard on Perseverance Flow approaches Abrams’ writing with the discipline of orchestra musicians and the creativity of improvisers. But instead of inviting living-legend musicians like Evan or William Parker or Ari Brown to solo freely over the composed materials, Abrams’ invited guest collaborator was the medium of the recording studio itself.

Situated at the board with engineer Greg Norman, Abrams pushed post-production techniques — found only sporadically on earlier NIS records — deep into the heart of the music, distorting and reshaping instruments to subtly, and at times aggressively, mutate timbre, texture, color, and time. Refracting the band’s signature mesmerizing chains of overlapping rhythmic patterns through the sonic funhouse of dub, Perseverance Flow becomes the most formally experimental NIS album to date.

Now a soundworld fully unique to itself is listening to itself, consoling and humoring itself, and consoling and humoring you. It is a destruction myth and a creation myth of a soundworld, together at once — energetically nutritious.

Joshua Abrams guimbri, electronics, dubs
Lisa Alvarado harmonium, electronics
Mikel Patrick Avery drums
Jason Stein bass clarinet