Natural Information Society
Location
- Chicago
Websites
Record Labels
Artist Biography
Natural Information Society (NIS) represents a convergence of musicians & artists to create sonic harbor, meditative space & kinetic momentum music. Realizing compositions by composer Joshua Abrams, the group's core quartet includes Abrams, Lisa Alvarado, Mikel Patrick Avery & Jason Stein. Working the seams between minimalism, jazz & experimental practice, the band has become a reference for contemporary non-idiomatic creative music. They have recorded 7 albums for eremite records & 2 collaborations with Bitchin Bajas for Drag City Records. The group has toured extensively in North America, Europe & Brazil using Alvarado's free hanging paintings as stage settings in concert. In 2021 Abrams formed an expanded version of NIS called the Natural Information Society Community Ensemble, adding winds & Chicago tenor saxophone legend Ari Brown to the group as heard on 2023's Since Time Is Gravity. Mandatory Reality as part of Lisa Alvarado's exhibition at The Kitchen, NYC. Their next record for eremite records will be released this fall.
Selected Press
...it’s patient, layered music that’s always heading somewhere, sometimes spare and sometimes complex and shimmering.
Ben Ratliff, New York Times
Abrams discovers new levels of mood and tone; his pieces seem to escape time completely.
Marc Masters, Pitchfork
It feels startlingly new, in terms of how the music is extrapolated, how the players relate, even as it feels like an ur-music, primal, body-centered, essential.
David Keenan, The Wire
The first live recording of the NIS, this is a performance of extraordinary power and vision, its relationship to the music of John Coltrane almost always magical. Occasionally there will be direct quotations (as with A Love Supreme’s principal motif appearing at the end of part two), but this is not some kind of successful imitation. Rather, it’s genetic fraternity, Parker and Abrams, Stein, Alvarado, and Avery crossing boundaries, arriving in that special otherness, that same Interzone once called “India.”
Stuart Broomer, Point of Departure