Why Didn't You Tell Me? (Part Twelve)

 

Every once in a while, there is a particular piece of music that has been made specifically for you, and it feels like all roads have led to this point in time. This is very much the case with ‘Perseverance Flow’, composed by Joshua Abrams and recorded with his colleagues in the Natural Information Society. It is on record a 35-minute work, perfect as a single-track CD, and is essentially a cyclical rhythmic passage repeated throughout that time which, as you listen again and again, reveals infinite variations, imagined or real, with the percussion, bass, clarinet and wheezing harmonium working together to create patterns that are incredibly emotional, indeed spiritual and mesmerising. It is perfectly titled, as it is one of those recordings where it becomes impossible not to go with the flow, and before you know it you are dancing around the room, completely absorbed: “We dig repetition in the music, and we're never going to lose it.”

Coinciding with the release of Perseverance Flow at the end of October, I was blessed to be able to experience the Natural Information Society live at Rich Mix, on the Bethnal Green Road. Seated onstage were the four core members of the group. There’s Johua Abrams to the fore, with Jason Stein on bass clarinet at the rear, Mikel Patrick Avery is to the right of him, with his drums and all sorts of percussive instruments, busy shaking, rattling and pounding everything. Incidentally, on the studio recording it is quite something when ten minutes from time Avery’s kick drum really gets going.

Then there’s Lisa Alvorado to the left, with that perfect Judee Sill look she has. At the back of the stage are hung a few huge silkscreens of Lisa’s beautiful abstract designs, like the ones that appear on the covers of the group’s recordings. She plays a gorgeously ornate harmonium, which seems less Nico and more ancient Welsh chapel and actually oddly adds to an almost Cajun feel at times, reinforcing suggestions that there is a link from ‘Perseverance Flow’ back through time to primordial swamp blues stomps.

It is Joshua who really demands attention, though, and I was lucky enough to be standing more-or-less right in front of him.  I love the way he looks now, like he has been living off-grid and has stepped out of the backwoods in one of Michael Farris Smith’s great novels. He is a huge bear of a man and wears the look well. The instrument he plays, the guimbri, is a strange and beautiful thing, with a handsomely carved wooden body and three thick strings from which Joshua gets astonishingly varied and richly resonant rhythmic sounds.

In a recent interview with David C. Obenour, for his Off Shelf site, Joshua describes the guimbri as “an ancient and futuristic instrument”. It is central to the Moroccan gnawi musical tradition, and one of its great exponents, Maâlem Hassan El Gadiri, built Joshua’s instrument. During the set he added a strange looking metal object to the end of the instrument’s neck, and in the Off Shelf article Joshua reveals it is a sersera, a rattle to add rhythm and noise. Oddly it makes the instrument look like a deadly weapon.

A performance of ‘Perseverance Flow’ formed the central part of the Natural Information Society’s set and live it was teased into something that lasted for the best part of an hour. Coincidentally or not, almost a year ago to the day, Speakers Corner Quartet played a revelatory set at the ICA featuring an hour-long opener. Some can make an hour fly by, while others contrive to make a three-minute pop song seem to plod on for an eternity.

Live, ‘Perseverance Flow’ becomes ritualistic healing music. It was funny watching people around me, initially nodding along appreciatively then gradually moving more and more parts of the body as the music, well, flowed over them. How did that hour go so fast? It is a tribute to the togetherness of the group. Anyway, on record you can hear ‘Perseverance Flow’ punctuated by intermittent sort of frog croaks. Live, it was the same thing, and presumably something to do with Joshua’s guimbri being connected to effects pedals but every time he caught me unawares and I never got to the bottom of how the hell he made that sound, or even where it came from, which I rather like.

In the extended version live there was room for individuals to stretch out and express themselves around the central rhythmic pattern being repeated over and over, although one did kind of expect the ghost of a young man to appear suddenly, shouting: “For God’s sake, don’t start improvising.” It struck me at the time that it’s funny how we all have pieces of music we wish could be eked out for an hour or so.

On a dance-related note I love how in publicity material Joshua makes explicit connections to new music coming from Chicago and Portugal. In the Off Shelf interview, he talks about how “much of the music emerging from Teklife and Príncipe over past decades are inspiring. There is an intersection between sample-based music, traditional musics, soul musics, minimal musics that feels vibrant to me.”

I may nod knowingly at this, but to be honest this is not my area of expertise. I will occasionally listen in to a footwork show, possibly a Jana Rush one, on NTS and be amazed and excited at what I hear but my knowledge of the form is very limited. And I really only know of the music coming out of Portugal through Nídia and initially her collaboration with the great Valentina Magaletti which was getting me dancing around this time last year and led me to other earlier records by Nídia which were magical. More recently there has been a remarkable and impossible to pin-down Kissom LP by XEXA on Príncipe and an accompanying show put together by her on NTS, but I guess this would more likely be tagged as experimental rather than club-oriented music.

Coincidentally or not, I first came under the spell of the Natural Information Society when listening to an Organic Music of Tokyo show with Chee Shimizu on NTS in March of this year. It was the opening part of a then very recent DJ set from Melbourne, and it started with the NIS’ ‘In Memory’s Prism’ in all its gradually unfolding 25-minute glory. I was eating at the time and probably spent much of that time in suspended animation, fork in mid-air, completely transported by the gently undulating waves of sound washing over me and cleansing my soul. I was instantly smitten but had no idea really what I had just experienced.

Immediately I tracked down an almost-reasonably priced secondhand copy of the 2CD set it appears on, Mandatory Reality on the Eremite label from 2019. The first CD opens with ‘In Memory’s Prism’ and is followed by the forty minute ‘Finite’. In the collaborative spirit of NIS recordings and live performances the core group is joined by Nick Mazzarella, Hamid Drake, Ben Lamar Gray and Ben Boye. I find that first CD (the second one is closer to the improv. / free jazz area of activity that Joshua Abrams has been very much a part of in Chicago for many years) remarkable and particularly effective for recentring at difficult times.

I was flabbergasted to learn that Joshua Abrams and the Natural Information Society have been active since 2010 and was rather frustrated their back catalogue was not really readily available at a reasonable price, then in April Drag City released Totality, a set by the Natural Information Society with Bitchin Bajas, apparently a long-delayed follow-up to their Autoimaginary record from 2015. It was wonderful, albeit slightly misleading as the BBs’ electronics and synths were a bit of a red herring when discovering NIS’ works.

My guardian angels were looking out for me, as during the summer this year, in partnership with London’s New Soil imprint, three themed compilations of material from the NIS’ archives were released digitally in quick succession, which was a lot to take in. The first of these, Meditation, kind of speaks for itself, and the music does exactly what the title implies. My favourite of the three is Momentum, which features the incredible ‘Abide in Sunset’ from the very first Natural Information record, where over a deep bouncing bass line by Joshua, Emmett Kelly and his guitar go exploring. Emmett Kelly seems to me like the name of a minor character in the story of The Byrds’ later years, so in a way it’s apt that he gets lost in a raga-meets-the-Velvets mood. And I love the inclusion of the second part of descension (out of our constrictions), a performance by the NIS with Evan Parker recorded live which is a gloriously infectious free jazz soukous-soaked hoedown: “feet don’t fail me now!”

It is baffling how the NIS passed me by for so long, as Joshua Abrams is a name I am reasonably familiar with. I know he was mentioned in these pages last year in a Barry Gifford-related post in connection with the excellent soundtrack to the film Roy’s World, based loosely on Barry’s Chicago short stories, composed by Jason Adasiewicz (who’s on the first NIS record) with Joshua Abrams playing bass.

I suppose, predictably, I immediately associate Joshua as part of the core group (with Chad Taylor, Archer Prewitt, and Rob Mazurek) playing on those first two immaculate and eternally inspirational Sam Prekop solo records, with musical supervision by Jim O’Rourke on the first and John McEntire on the second. For a long time now, I have claimed the initial Sam Prekop set from 1999 as my favourite record ever, though in recent times I have perhaps played its successor, Who’s Your New Professor, more, discovering new nuances and depth as time passes.

In the same timeframe as those two Sam Prekop records Joshua also recorded for Thrill Jockey as part of Town and Country, performing what they called rustic or back-porch minimalism. Now, I was aware of the name but totally missed out on hearing their music: yet another infringement likely to get me debarred for life from the Chicago Underground Music Appreciation Society. It seems every time I think I’ve got a handle on that scene a whole new area of activity reveals itself which is both wonderful and terrifying, not to say expensive.

It is an interesting conundrum: why didn’t I hear or listen to Town and Country in the early years of the new millennium, where would one have learned about them? How would they have been described? Ah, what the hell. It’s the old thing about music finding you when the time is right. Listening recently to T&C in many ways they sound so ahead of their time, particularly on the live 5 LP from 2003 with its beautiful improv. pieces and drones.

The first Town and Country record came out in 1998 on the BOXmedia label. It was engineered by Casey Rice, always a good sign, and it is a lovely record, one that frequently hardly seems to be there, in the Arvo Pärt tradition, or I guess closer to home you could say a little like Labradford. At times there are suggestions of something that could wander into the territory shared by, say, the instrumental ‘Smaller Rivers’ from that Sam Prekop solo debut. But no. Nothing happens. There is just this serene, calm nothingness which has a strange, fascinating appeal.

Their first release for Thrill Jockey opens with the extended meander ‘Give Your Baby A Standing Ovation’, a connection to an earlier surge of Chicago creativity, and from there over the course of four more LPs they became pleasingly stranger, more abstract and inventive, with the quartet using an ever-growing esoteric range of instrumentation. By the time of their final release Up Above in 2006 their armoury included a harmonium, bass clarinet, guimbri, and an exotic collection of chimes, bells, hand drums and percussion instruments, so it’s tempting to make connections in a simplistic sense to what Joshua would go on and do with the Natural Information Society

One pleasing by-product of belatedly discovering Town and Country has been finding a 2001 CD by Terminal 4, a project led by cellist and composer Fred Lonberg-Holm with Joshua on bass, T&C colleague Ben Vida on guitar, plus Jeb Bishop on trombone and guitar. It is an incredibly beautiful record. Another recent lucky random find was a CD from 2017, Ran Do, which is Norwegian saxophonist Kjetil Møster with Joshua, Jeff Parker and John Herndon. The three Js played together whenever possible Tuesdays at the Rodan bar in Chicago where they first met and played with Kjetil, hence I guess the name of the LP. Generally, the record is at the freer improvised end of the jazz spectrum, though a beautiful ballad, ‘Pajama Jazz’, on which Jeff excels, closes the record.

A new edition of Jeff Parker’s first International Anthem release in 2016, The New Breed, comes with a transcript of a conversation with label co-founder Scott McNiece where Jeff talks about how early in the new millennium deep discussions with Joshua Abrams helped him find a way forward in fusing organic music with samples, beats and electronics, and there is specific mention of Joshua’s solo project as Reminder where he worked through his own ideas about mixing natural instrumentation and digital technology. I am afraid I have to say (yet again) I was not aware of Reminder or rather did not realise it was Joshua’s project. So, I tracked down a copy of Reminder’s Continuum from 2006 and became rather obsessed with the way it blends so successfully acoustic aspects with hip-hop techniques and beats.

Interestingly, it contains a track, ‘Terradactyl Town’, which is a remix of Chris Lopes’ ’Toy Boat’ from Jeff Parker’s Relatives, a 2005 release on Thrill Jockey, which is a great record, especially Jeff’s ‘Mannerisms’ which is a living-room dancefloor favourite here more reminiscent of a Phil Upchurch track than one might expect. Apparently, there was a second Reminder set, West Side Cabin, which seems to be only available in a physical edition from Japanese outlets, so I have only heard the track ‘Halfsies’ with Jeff Parker guesting.

During his chat with Jeff, Scott McNeice says: “I remember hearing Abrams’s Reminder stuff. Well, I also remember the first time I saw Abrams play bass …  He was playing double bass in a live band for Prefuse 73, who I was pretty obsessed with at that time. At the time, I thought Prefuse was making some of the most interesting music I had ever heard. So of course I was like: who's that dude playing a standup bass with him? When I got that Reminder LP Continuum, I also realized he was on Prefuse’s label, Eastern Development.”

I would have loved to see Joshua onstage with Prefuse 73. I adored all that abstract electronica and hip-hop collage stuff, and actually that Reminder record did sort of make me think of the early releases by Scott Herren in his Prefuse 73 guise, especially Vocal Studies & Uprock Narratives and One Word Extinguisher which early in the new millennium seemed so exciting and came with cool artwork on Warp.

Since then, I’ve had spells of immersing myself in Herren’s music and drifting away and losing track then homing back in occasionally and falling in love with Prefuse 73 once more. That mention by Scott was another thing that got me interested again and playing some of my old CDs. If I had been paying attention properly it would have registered that Reminder was involved with the 2005 set Surrounded By Silence.

Looking through my back pages here it seems the last Prefuse record to connect with me was The Only She Chapters from 2011. Writing about it for a Sea & Cake special I said it was “a particularly engrossing work, which has gradually revealed itself to be a work of astonishing beauty and boldness, strange and disorientating and perhaps as frustrating as ever, but incredibly lovely. There is a poignant aspect to the record too, as it features what was one of the last performances by Trish Keenan, or perhaps it is a hint of the performance Trish contributed hidden under layers of gauze and cobwebs and odd echoes.”

That seems fair enough. What strikes me, listening to it now, is that, yes, there are similarities sonically and visually to late-period Broadcast (they were label-mates, too) but it is striking how contemporary it sounds, almost as if it could be a new release on AD93 alongside james K, feeo, and so on. I am sure I’ve seen Herren say that maybe with the benefit of hindsight She Chapters shouldn’t have been issued under the Prefuse name. I don’t know. Anyway, I have always liked the way Herren would work using multiple identities, rather like Georgia Anne Muldrow was doing so wonderfully well around the same time.

So, another of Herren’s projects Savath & Savalas also recorded for Warp and blessed us with some gorgeous loping Brazilian-inspired creations, often sung in Catalan by Eva Puyuelo Muns, underpinned with crackling electronica and glitchy hip-hop trickery. A particular highlight was the 2004 release Apropa’t which rather perfectly featured Joshua Abrams on bass, John Herndon on drums, and John McEntire at the controls. It included a cover of ‘Um girassol da cor de seu cabelo’ from Clube da Esquina, and at this point I don’t recall which I heard first.

After the Mañana EP in 2004 I kind of lost track of Savath & Savalas recordings until this time last year when very unexpectedly a local charity shop had a batch of sealed Stones Throw-related CDs from about 15-years-ago, which was very odd. These included a Savath & Savalas title, La Llama from 2009 which I had no idea existed. La Llama was recorded by a core trio of Guillermo Scott Herren, Eva Puyuelo Muns and Roberto Carlos Lange, and is way out there as though they didn’t give a damn about pleasing anyone but themselves as they constructed swirling psychedelic webs of sound. A dub version followed shortly afterwards, which was even further out there in terms of experimentation and disorientation, upping the irritant quotient considerably. This was credited to The Predicate, another identity of Herren’s.

Somehow along the way I also missed out on the release of Golden Pollen in 2007, a one-off recording for Anti- under the Savath & Savalas name, though there was no Eva. I guess this was almost the big shot at a proper pop record, by Herren’s off-kilter standards at least. So, half of it was his trademark woozy, fragmented DIY assemblage, and the other half was produced by John McEntire with a strong cast of performers from the Chicago Underground community, including Joshua Abrams on bass, Nicole Mitchell on flute, Renée Baker on violin, Tomeka Reid playing cello, Greg Ward on clarinet, Lawrence Pike on drums and Mantana Roberts playing saxophone. Joshua also provided string arrangements for a few tracks.

Somehow listening to it now I can sense connections to last year’s big YHO favourite Cabana by Lau Ro on Far Out. The use of strings maybe connects to Preparations, the Prefuse 73 record that also came out in 2007. What I hadn’t realised was that this came with a second disc, Interregnums, which you might expect to be bonus tracks and remixes but is actually an orchestral suite of reinventions of beats and fragments from Preparations itself. In a weird way it is probably the best thing Herren has ever done.

There must have been something in the air at that time with orchestral fragmented hip-hop.  The Suite For Ma Dukes symphonic tribute to J Dilla grew from an idea explored by Carlos Niño and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson on their reinvention of Dilla’s ‘Nag Champa’ which appeared on the 2007 ArtDon’tSleep Presents compilation From L.A. With Love, which is a great set. It features a couple of Madlib incarnations, the godlike Georgia Anne Muldrow, Flying Lotus, Nathan Yell (aka Aloe Blacc), Daedalus, as well as lesser-known (to me) names from the loose Los Angeles hip-hop / experimental pop community like Exile, Gaslamp Killer, A Race of Angels, and my personal favourites From Leaf to Feather whose ‘Night Sun’ is like a dream date where Money Mark sits in with The Sea & Cake. Several names from this collection, coincidentally or not, appear among the credits for Prefuse 73’s Preparations / Interregnums.

In 2009 there was a live performance of Suite For Ma Dukes, arranged and orchestrated by Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, as part of the Timeless series of shows at the Luckman Fine Arts Complex in Los Angeles. These special events were put on by the Mochila team of photographers and film-makers Eric Coleman (who appears as Coleman with a track on that From L.A. With Love set) and Brian Cross. Cross is better known as B+ with credits appearing on so many important things, such as in old copies of Wax Poetics and for that cover photo for Entroducing. He is one of that small band of people Stateside who back in the day I was in awe of, along with Dave Tompkins, Dante Carfagna and Eothen ‘Egon’ Alappat.

B+ also has a track named in his honour on the 2001 David Axelrod comeback record issued by Mo’Wax, an LP which still sounds magnificent. The plan had been for Axelrod to perform as part of the Timeless series, but he was taken ill unfortunately. So, in addition to the Dilla tribute, there was a special performance by Mulatu Astatke and Arthur Verocai got to perform his incredible 1972 self-titled LP which must have been a dream come true for everyone present. I was lucky enough to see Arthur at the Barbican last year, and it was astonishingly beautiful and so very moving.  

Coincidentally or not, while putting this post together I stumbled across an episode of the Heat Rocks podcast on the theme of that debut Arthur Verocai LP, presented by the journalist Oliver Wang with Jocelyn Michelle Brown who seems to wear many hats as a force for good within the music industry as well as being part of the International Anthem family. Their guest was Joshua Abrams who revealed he first came across Arthur Verocai during the sessions for Savath & Savalas’ Apropa’t. Jocelyn meanwhile first heard it while DJing with Joshua in Chicago. In the show she said something brilliant about how the best thing about the Arthur Verocai record for her has been a sense of people coming together and sharing a voyage of discovery. I really like that and for me it captures a special part of the musical experience, and is I guess part of why all this is still going.