Chicago’s independent music scene has always had a flavour all of its own. Home of groundbreaking record labels like Thrill Jockey, Hausu Mountain and International Anthem, the city has nurtured the careers of countless musical outcasts and sonic explorers. A line can be drawn from the post-hardcore scene of the eighties, through Tortoise, David Grubbs, Jim O’Rourke, Gastr Del Sol, U.S. Maple and Squirrel Bait in the nineties, all the way to the weird and wild agglomeration of free jazz, musique concrete, guitar freakery and contemporary composition that can be found in Chicago clubs and recording studios today. Drag City has always been at the centre of the city’s musical genesis, releasing key works by Gastr Del Sol, U.S. Maple and countless others.
More than just a record label, Drag City has acted as a nexus between artists and forms, a hothouse of unconventional creativity. More than perhaps any other label, they are famously accommodating when it comes to outsider artists and bands that don’t fit into any mould. Two such bands are Natural Information Society and Bitchin Bajas, who have come together for Totality, a second collaborative album, ten years after Automaginart, their first meeting of minds. Natural Information Society currently operate as a four-piece featuring Joshua Abrams on double bass, harmonium player Lisa Alvarado, drummer Mikel Patrick Avery and recent addition Jason Stein on bass clarinet. They occupy a position in the psychedelic avant garde that draws on Reichian minimalism, krautrock, and free jazz. Bitchin Bajas, a trio consisting of Cave frontman/organist Cooper Crain, Rob Frye on flute and synth and electronics mastermind Daniel Quinlivan, cover similar ground but from a different angle. Their compositions and improvisations tend to be lengthy and sometimes drone-based, with an emphasis on new-age textures. Both acts share an affinity with jazz experimentalists like Don Cherry and Sun Ra – Bitchin Bajas recorded a mind-bending and frankly wonderful album of Sun Ra covers in 2021 (Switched On Ra).
Totality consists of four tracks: three longer jams and one sub-five minute blast. That shorter track, Nothing Does Not Show, utilises eastern textures, a creeping rhythm section and some spacy interplay between flute and synths. It feels both relaxed and irrevocable, full of ideas and full of space. With seven separate agents playing together, there could easily be a sense of overstuffed maximalism, but this is avoided. The two groups know how to lean on each other without getting in each other’s way. At the other end of the spectrum is the title track, a sprawling mass that incorporates drone and a sense of buildup that draws from post-rock and even classical music. It’s a slow-growing assemblage of synth hums and pulses, percussive interjections that work on pure feeling rather than expected rhythmic progression, and it all lures the listener into a trance-like state. There are elements of new age music at play, but they are presented alongside a more mischievous approach to improvisation, with every clang and clatter, every bubble and warble, inserted with a sense of both care and elation.
Always 9 Seconds Away, an Abrams composition, features guttural woodwind and has a slow, shuddering tempo that nonetheless hints at melodic progression. The group lock into a deliberate march, allowing decorative curlicues of flute to peel off the main theme. It is a distinctive and highly original approach, landing somewhere in the region of meditative spiritual jazz, but more forceful than that label implies. The final piece, Clock no Clock, is a groovier beast, more like their work on Automaginary. It travels at a quicker clip and displays elements of space-rock and hints of afro-futurism. The spiralling, heady conclusion is a true sonic freak-out, but impressively, it never sacrifices the sense of space that the septet have nurtured throughout the album.
Both Bitchin Bajas and Natural Information Society have long and distinguished back catalogues which are well worth exploring, but when they get together there emerges a singular kind of magic, a magic that epitomises the creative spirit of the Chicago scene but is nevertheless unique. Totality, as its name suggests, is the fullest possible rendering of that magic and an essential piece of work.
Totality (April 25th, 2025) Drag City
Pre-Order Totality: https://lnk.to/totality