Joshua Abrams & Natural Information Society
Simultonality

Faced with a masterpiece album like this, one might be tempted to use terminologies such as 'art music', 'progressive-jazz', contaminations and experimentalisms, and seek significant parallels with various artists like Can, John Coltrane, Sun Ra Orchestra. High-sounding terms and uneasy comparisons that, however, after listening to 'Simultonality' (Eremite Records), will indeed seem justified by the high quality of the product and the uniqueness of the recordings offered.

Joshua Abrams is a significant name in the Chicago music scene. He has collaborated and played with artists like Tortoise, Matana Roberts, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Joan of Arc, David Grubbs, Sam Prekop.

Already in 2015, he had stunned the more intellectual and non-mainstream American music scenes with the release of 'Magnetoception', always accompanied by his Natural Information Society, an album in which he, instead of playing the bass, focused on experimenting with the sound of the guimbri, a three-stringed instrument of North African origins, which he introduced in a context of concrete music reshuffled in a psychedelic progressive jazz context.

The album was rightly acclaimed as one of the most sensitive episodes of experimental music of the year. For the writer, we are indeed discussing an essential chapter in the music of recent years, just as this second work is incredibly effective and qualitatively hard to surpass at the same time.

I'm specifically talking about 'Simultonality', an album recorded between Chicago and Montreal between 2014 and 2015 and produced by Abrams with Michael Ehlers, who had also worked with the group on the first album.

The lineup of the Natural Information Society is almost the same as that of 'Magnetoception'. Joshua Abrams plays the guimbri and bass; Lisa Alvarado the harmonium; Michael Avery the drums and percussion; Ben Boye the piano and the Wurlitzer; Ari Brown the saxophone; Emmett Kelly the electric guitar; Frank Rosaly again on drums and percussion.

Abrams had a specific choice of using two drummers, which is at the foundation of the album's compositions and technically justifies the album's title on its own.

'Simultonality' consists of five tracks in which Joshua Abrams and the NIS blend what we could define as traditional folk music with the use of atmospheres tinged with tropicalism; minimalist electronic music in the style of YMO and math-rock; progressive jazz with that obsessive and hypnotic repetitiveness typical of kraut-rock.

The Guardian talked about an album that sounds like Jaki Liebezeit's Can having a jam session with Philip Glass: a fun definition that partially conveys the work's contents, most of which approach and sometimes exceed ten minutes in length.

The ultimate goal of the album, practically a series of instrumental sessions of cosmic music carefully crafted like ceramics skillfully molded by the hands of an artisan, seems to be an ideal meeting between the tradition of African music and, in general, the southern part of our planet, with the more experimental and avant-garde drives of instrumentalists like Philip Glass, La Monte Young, Steve Reich or that great experience that was the no-wave between the late seventies and early eighties in NYC, but at the same time, revisiting the great lesson of Sun Ra's psychedelic music and Fela Kuti's afrobeat.

Definitely one of the albums most representative of a new phase in the history of the human race.

Welcome.