Perpetually glazed drone trio Bitchin Bajas and minimalist polyrhythm manufacturing unit Pure Data Society have as soon as once more burbled up from the neon miasma the place the cosmos meets your Discogs need record. Totality, an expansive, blissful 43-minute gradual boat of nü-kosmische and minimalist rock, comes almost 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 Data 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 could be a problem to not produce one thing stunning. The 2 bands are deeply steeped within the Chicago experimental music group, enthralled by Twentieth-century minimalism and Solar Ra, always aiming for ecstatic peaks, and prepared to experience 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 Data Society chief Joshua Abrams. In case you count on a little bit 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 Contemporary, 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 glorious 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 Data Society have merely develop into considered one of greatest American rock bands going: a propulsive, celebratory dance act endlessly grooving someplace on the sides of Afrobeat, avant-jazz, Gnawa music, and Steve Reich.
On Totality, NIS principally deal in environment and drama. Almost 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 Lifeless’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 underneath the moonlight. Aspect B sprawler “At all times 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.
