Perpetually glazed drone trio Bitchin Bajas and minimalist polyrhythm manufacturing unit Pure Info Society have as soon as once more burbled up from the neon miasma the place the cosmos meets your Discogs need checklist. Totality, an expansive, blissful 43-minute sluggish boat of nü-kosmische and minimalist rock, comes practically 10 years after their final full-length collaboration, 2015’s Autoimaginary. That album imagined the charged assembly between Terry Riley (circa 1964) and Terry Riley (circa 1969): The Bajas’ new-age synth gush and fluttering flutes paved the Curved Rainbow Street, Pure Information Society steadily driving their drums, harmonium, and Moroccan guimbri down the autobahn. In matching up the tangerine dreamers within the former group and the dream syndicate outsiders within the latter, it will be a problem to not produce one thing stunning. The 2 bands are deeply steeped within the Chicago experimental music neighborhood, enthralled by Twentieth-century minimalism and Solar Ra, consistently aiming for ecstatic peaks, and keen to journey a wavelength indefinitely.
Naturally, their second album collectively delivers all their beautiful hallmarks—heat harmonium drone, weightless synths, and Möbius strips of low finish courtesy of Pure Info Society chief Joshua Abrams. In the event you anticipate just a little extra this time round, it’s solely as a result of the bands have come so extremely far individually within the final decade. Bitchin Bajas have persistently expanded their palette. Bajas Recent, their 2017 profession peak, sharpened their synths into diamonds of arpeggiated euphoria; the 2021 Solar Ra tribute Switched On Ra allow them to discover extra amorphous and nocturnal zones; and 2022’s wonderful Bajacillators up to date their sound with the hyperreal blips of Laurie Spiegel’s Music Mouse software program, sounding like a connection between the Berlin college and Japanese ambient. For his or her half, Pure Info Society have merely grow to be one in every of greatest American rock bands going: a propulsive, celebratory dance act endlessly grooving someplace on the edges of Afrobeat, avant-jazz, Gnawa music, and Steve Reich.
On Totality, NIS largely deal in ambiance and drama. Practically 17 minutes lengthy, the self-titled opener pulsates and throbs with specks of percussion and errant electronics, spiraling like dank, dazed, psychonautical jams within the vein of the Grateful Useless’s “Darkish Star” or Black Sabbath’s “Planet Caravan.” Across the 12-minute mark, Abrams kicks right into a lackadaisical 7/8 bassline and the monitor slowly morphs right into a Jon Hassell-style dance beneath the moonlight. Aspect B sprawler “All the time 9 Seconds Away” has a equally sleepy crawl however performs like a doom-jazz model of the reminiscence sport Simon, its disjunctive melody rising like lichen.