Whilst I’ve been an adult for decades, the announcement that new music is coming from musicians I love, returns me to a childlike form of glee. An instant excitement that tries to form what the music will sound like in my imagination.
A new collaboration between two groups I’ve have adored for years – Natural Information Society and Bitchin Bajas, is my grown-up equivalent of being gifted a box of Space Lego.
Whilst both groups have released several albums since their last joint effort – Autoimaginary, a decade ago, this new collaboration Totality feels like a perfect time to be invited into their newest zones.
Admittedly, all this front-loaded excitement meant that several initial playthroughs drifted by. Full of pleasant rhythms and atmospherics but nothing that hit in the way I’d somehow hoped for. However, after a few hours of spring sunshine in the garden, good company and eventually, a suitably relaxed stretch out on the sofa transformed Totality into a sumptuously detailed listen, opening up like a whole new joyous world.
The opening and title track, Totality is 17 minutes that grow out of of harmonium and synth throbs, the ancient and the space-aged, converging into a rising column of sound. Music slowly expanding like a tiny seed neatly unfolding itself into a vast tree. Each moment a balancing act between stillness and the tiniest edges.
The next track, Nothing Does Not Show gently twists and winds around hand drums, flutes and buzzing electronic mist.
Always 9 Seconds Away revisits the plodding but amazing ambient grids of Mandatory Reality. But here, the edges perform a weird trick of dancing around absolute stillness rather than any sense of forward propulsion. Over several plays, the idea re-enforces that the arc of this album appears to be doing something highly unique…
We are bathed in the antithesis of action, or any dynamic faster than our own sense of time. This music is a meditation on time stopping.
This idea that Totality somehow strives to provide a reset rather than a diversion also seems to be suggested in the albums artwork. We’ve long regarded the sleeve visuals of Natural Information Society as a visual map of the music. Created as always by Lisa Alvarado, NIS’s harmonium player, Totality is an imperfect human imagining of balance. Two different forms coming together to create a solid unit. Two group of individuals, textures, ideas, silence and sound, performer and listener, something and nothing – all focused and aligning into a singularity.
Whilst this might risk sounding somehow boring, the effect is strangely beautiful. In a time where the news is full of bewildering chaos, every day might be a new struggle, music often feels like a particularly well-suited masking agent. To then take that material and somehow flip everything so there is no illusion at all is hugely refreshing. You find yourself quietly listening, hanging on each note, basking in each rarified silence.
You. Are. Here.
The reward for embracing this whole adventure comes in the final 8 and a half minutes. Clock No Clock fans out in your ears, having arrived the long way, the closer finally offering some ecstatic payoff. Bleeping electronics, percussive moirés and flutes spectacularly rising and aligning into a spine-tingling thunderous march, and then some vision of paradise.
Totality ends up being superbly effective but it’s an album that deserves carving out special time to enjoy. Find 43 minutes in your day, and completely devote yourself to it.
Totality is the latest converging of energy, of two amazing groups. Another blistering example of restraint and subtlety being a psychedelic superpower for all involved…
Totality is out 25 April on Drag City on vinyl, cassette and digitally here and here
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