Announcing Perseverance Flow, the latest album from acclaimed Chicago-based ensemble Natural Information Society (NIS), release date 2024-10-24. After a trilogy of double LPs by expanded manifestations of the band that began in 2018 with Mandatory Reality & continued through Since Time Is Gravity (a Pitchfork Best Jazz & Experimental Album of the Year selection & Mojo’s #1 Underground Album of 2023), NIS returns to its core formation of Lisa Alvarado on harmonium, Mikel Patrick Avery on drums, Jason Stein on bass clarinet, & composer/multi-instrumentalist Joshua Abrams on guimbri for one continuous 35 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; a dose of the medicine many of us look to music to deliver awaits you inside. 

One of the deep contemplations of this natural information (thanks Bill Callahan) is the wide range of source materials Abrams draws from over the band’s more than 15 year history: Ideas from minimalism, modal jazz & traditional musics are regularly reimagined in these compositions. The 2021 double LP descension (Out of Our Constrictions), with guest soloist Evan Parker, reflected aspects of Abrams’ love of party music, Chicago house, & John Coltrane. *But even veteran travelers with the NIS best brace themselves for the Perseverance Flow.

Speaking to the history & the inspirations behind the album, Abrams offers: “We played the piece for a year in concert before the recording. At Electrical (Audio Studios, Chicago) we went in at 11 & were done in time to pick our kids up from school.” Abrams 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 & Lisbon.”

The core NIS ensemble heard on Perseverance Flow always address Abrams’ writing with the discipline of orchestra musicians & the creativity of improvisers. But this time around, instead of inviting living legend status musicians Evan or William Parker or Ari Brown as honored guests 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 & reshaping instruments to subtly &, at times, aggressively mutate timbre & texture, color & time.

Refracting the band’s signature mesmerizing chains of overlapping rhythmic patterns through the sonic funhouse of dub makes Perseverance Flow the most formally experimental NIS album to date. Now a soundworld fully unique to itself is listening to itself, consoling & humoring itself, & consoling & humoring you. A destruction myth & a creation myth of a soundworld together at once —”energetically nutritious” (October 2025 Issue 500 The Wire) supernatural information society.

“Perseverance Flow is skipping rope in slo-mo. A dance of co-operation to rally guts & humors & keep marching through pouring tears” (Abrams).

Release date 2025-10-24. 1st eremite edition pressed on premium audiophile-quality 140 gram vinyl at Fidelity Record Pressing from Kevin Gray/Cohearent Audio lacquers. Mastered by Helge Sten (Deathprod). 1st 300 direct order copies include eremite’s signature retro-audiophile inner-sleeves, hand screen-printed by Siwa Studios, Northern New Mexico. CD & EU vinyl edition available from our partner Aguirre Records.

"An outstanding Chicago bassist, Joshua Abrams regularly contributes to a host of bands, drawing on roots from hip-hop to free jazz. He also leads a singular project, Natural Information Society (NIS), a band that stretches across time, origins, technologies and sources, and one which has mutated significantly in its 15-year history, documented on a series of Eremite LP releases. Abrams also plays guembri, the bass lute of the Gnawa people of North Africa, introduced to free jazz circles by Moroccan master Maleem Mahmoud Ghania, who in the ’90s stepped outside traditional circles to play with saxophonists Pharoah Sanders and Peter Brötzmann and percussionist Hamid Drake, the latter an occasional member of NIS. Recent NIS recordings include two double-LP sets, Since Time Is Gravity, by an 11-member Community Edition and descension (Out of Our Constrictions) by the current core quartet of Abrams, Lisa Alvarado (harmonium), Mikel Patrick Avery (drums) and Jason Stein (bass clarinet), with Evan Parker (soprano) joining them on a single 75-minute piece.
With Perseverance Flow, Abrams, as composer and producer, takes NIS in another direction, composing a piece for the quartet’s distinctive members and instruments, then editing and processing the results into a serene, pulsing, repeating work with regular shifts and time markers, transforming instrumental identities into novel sounds and short modular phrases. There’s a melody that’s regularly an extended and shifting ostinato, there’s another that’s a high-pitched soprano, more minimal still and not readily traceable to an originating sound, though the bass clarinet may be the likeliest contender. These alterations are such that only percussion and guembri are frequently identifiable. Stein’s bass clarinet only becomes strongly evident as itself nine minutes in. A certain repeating jump-start suggests a grand piano’s bass figure or the clicking of an MRI machine, yet this technological dream with its resonating soprano melody remains so fiercely human and fundamentally American that the album forms loose affiliations with music as far flung as Santo & Johnny’s “Sleep Walk” and Harry Partch’s Delusion of the Furies. The submerged instrumental identities contribute to the dream-like state, as if original sonic personalities have gone to sleep, and the results suggest a sustained techno-lullaby, a kind of mechanized bliss, a harbinger, perhaps, of the music currently most needed". --Stuart Broomer, New York City Jazz Record

"Joshua Abrams leads the Natural Information Society quartet into battle, or at least toward it, on the joyfully meandering instrumental album Perseverance Flow. Proceeding in a march of trancelike, intoxicating repetition, Abrams and his bandmates embark on a 35-minute pilgrimage to the place where jazz, contemporary classical, and multinational folk convene, achieving singularity in a state of ritual rhythm." --Pitchfork

"Spacemen 3 used to promote their music as being for the 'fucked up children of the world,' in addition to the more famous part about taking drugs to make music, etc. Natural Information Society could be described in a similar fashion, except they make music for the fucked up adults of the world, the kind who still take drugs and are baffled by their peers bending over backwards to make 'the kids' think they’re cool by slobbering over music clearly made for children. If you count yourselves among the former, the Chicago band’s latest is made for you: sophisticated psychedelia pulsing with rhythmic intensity and rich with droney waves of harmonium. Made up of a single slow-burning, 37-minute long jam, the movement here is subtle yet in its own way aggressive and sharply focused, carefully drawing the listener into the widening gyre at the center of the band’s humane, organic trance." --Mariana Timony, Bandcamp Daily Essential Releases

"The piece, called “Perseverance Flow,” began slowly, with Abrams playing rhythmically on a gimbri—a Sub-Saharan, three-stringed, skin-covered box—in his lap. Alvarado, on hand-pumped harmonium, let the reeds make chords that filled the room. Mikel Patrick Avery, on a drum kit, launched a bass drum’s beat through mists of percussion, and on bass clarinet, Jason Stein made sounds like swells and piercing winds. It was rhythms intersecting rhythms, and the room felt like an ocean, the seas shifting, tide coming in. But then, after an hour that felt like minutes, Alvarado’s chords led us home safe, the sounds calming, the room still vibrating, the chords resolved, the world a different place." --Robert Sullivan, Vogue

Anyone who’s studied meditation or watched a Formula 1 race knows you can travel great distances without going anywhere at all—and enjoy the process of not getting there. There’s pleasure in following a circuit so frequently and so closely that everyday bits of the landscape become landmarks (we always pass that bullet-holed stop sign on this route) and a pang when those landmarks change (they replaced the stop sign!). Natural Information Society’s music operates on similar principles, drawing together the thrum of Moroccan gnawa, the austere profundity of Philip Glass, and the circular structures of John Coltrane at his most spiritual into a sound that doesn’t progress so much as it rotates. Its pleasures come from the steady accumulation of repetitions and all the little tweaks and evolutions and devolutions that composer Joshua Abrams and his band have built into their music.
Perseverance Flow is Natural Information Society’s first non-collaborative record since 2023’s jazz-fractaled Since Time Is Gravity. That album presented a more relaxed version of the group, unfurling its music as though rolling out a dusty Turkish carpet. Perseverance Flow’s tight focus—one theme looped ceaselessly, with modest embellishment, for 35 minutes—feels like a microscopic view of that same rug. The phrase is initially tight and loping: a two-note harmonium riff, a lightly heraldic bass clarinet, Abrams’ clip-clopping guembri, a little one-two drumbeat, all of it held together as tightly as pencils bundled by a rubber band. The group performed the piece live for a year before recording, which gives the album a warm and lived-in feel despite its formal constriction; imagine the Sun Ra Arkestra in big-band mode, playing a single bar over and over until achieving liftoff. Taking equal inspiration from Jamaican dub and Chicago dance music, Abrams edited the one-take performance in post-production, dropping in tonal tweaks and rhythmic inversions with a jeweler’s eye for detail.
In the same way that a diamond’s symmetrical shine is both easy to admire and requires an eyepiece to appreciate in full, Perseverance Flow’s charm is shaped by the tiny variations built into the score. Once the theme is established and allowed to settle, harmonium player Lisa Alvarado flips her pattern, playing a palindrome of the simple rise-and-fall melody. The shift is so smooth it can take a moment to notice it’s happened, and even then you might second-guess the extent of the change. Drummer Mikel Patrick Avery loosens his percussion a few minutes later, playing something that sounds like pebbles sloshing in a plastic bucket. The soft shuffle is soon absorbed—whether actually or just by a kind of aural illusion—into the original pattern. Abrams anchors the sound with his Moroccan guembri, occasionally halting the steady limp of the primary line to tie a fluid knot without losing a step.
While it’s not unusual for repetition to turn a musical phrase inside out, similar to the way a word loses its meaning once you’ve said it a few times, Perseverance Flow’s emotional register stays constant. The phrases gradually begin to lengthen—at one point, Alvarado’s harmonium sounds more like an accordion playing a Cajun song in slow-mo—which gives the piece enough momentum to stay grounded. At no point does it even glance in the direction of chaos; you could probably thread a needle with the sound wave. Around the 19-minute mark, the entire ensemble pulls up together in a way that suggests a vamp, then immediately falls back into the pattern without anyone losing their place. It’s such a weird little thrill that, if you’re properly locked in, it feels like peaking in sync with a 2 a.m. bass drop.
While the instrumentation wouldn’t be out of place at your local roots festival, the dance music influence on Perseverance Flow is undeniable. Abrams’ frequent switches and intertwined notes mimic the braided bass hits and glitchy rhythms of footwork without ever leaving the aesthetic context of gnawa. Little clap-back rhythms pop up occasionally. At one point, something that sounds like a bag of shells being dropped on a snare drum introduces a new back-and-forth to the theme that matches the harmonium and brings the piece’s shuffle closer to something like hip-hop. It’s a canny way of making sure the listener’s body stays tuned in to what could easily become cerebral; you will not nod your head more insistently to a piece of experimental music this year.
Two-thirds of the way through, Avery pounds what sounds like a heavily padded kick drum in double time, just off-beat and distant enough to make it feel like the thump of a poorly insulated club. Abrams picks up the new rhythm and follows it, and for a few moments, the band seems to be playing both the main Perseverance Flow theme and a separate dance song at the same time, though the theoretical line between the two is impossible to find. Eventually, that intervention fades, too, revealing that each of the musicians is off doing their own thing, and despite that, feeling more like an ensemble than ever.
Music like this sometimes gets called “durational,” or likened to the theoretical impermanence of Zeno’s Arrow—an object that appears constant yet is recomposing itself in every moment. It is hard, listening to Perseverance Flow, not to think of the Buddhist notion of becoming, or something like philosopher Henri Bergson’s conception of the élan. Both of which are fair descriptions and logical reactions to a music that seems to do nothing but go in circles with academic confidence. But merry-go-rounds go in circles, too. As do pinwheels. You want durational? Major League Baseball teams play 162 games every season, usually for the same few thousand people. Despite the weight of the intellectual concepts and the elegance of the score, despite the band’s association with the cream of Chicago’s always-rich avant-garde scene, this record is no less approachable than an afternoon Cubs game. Appropriately enough, it gets better with each spin, too. --Sadie Sartini Garner, Pitchfork