For most of their 15-year career, Bitchin Bajas have lived by the mantra, “Repetition is a form of change.” Across countless synth meditations, Cooper Crain, Rob Frye, and Dan Quinlivan have turned looping into a kind of transcendence. A simple figure—some glowing keyboard tones, a breath of flute, a pulse of rhythm—would stretch into infinity. Subtle shifts in tone, pacing, or resonance would accumulate until a fleeting motif became a portal, suspending time in a shimmering blur.
A turning point came in 2017 with Bajas Fresh, when the trio covered Sun Ra’s “Angels and Demons at Play.” The distance between Bitchin Bajas’ cosmic synth explorations and Sun Ra’s celestial jazz wasn’t as wide as it first appeared. Both shared a fascination with outer space, spirituality, and sound as motion. The cover opened a new door: melody began to seep into their hypnotic minimalism. It paved the way for 2022’s Switched on Ra—an album-length tribute that reimagined Sun Ra’s compositions through the Bajas’ prismatic lens—and their lush collaboration with Natural Information Society, Totality, earlier this year.
Their latest release, Inland See, builds on this evolution. Where previous records assembled intricate sequences with watchmaker precision, these four expansive tracks zoom out, emphasizing whole phrases over flickering arpeggios. Instead of a clockwork of endless expansion, Inland See breathes in peaks and valleys. The music still floats in that signature Bajas haze—full of slowly rotating harmonics, oscillating tones, and shimmering textures—but it now moves with a sense of shape and songcraft.
The opener, “Skylarking,” makes this shift immediately clear. Built around a relaxed two-chord vamp, it feels almost like you’ve stumbled into an unhurried afternoon jam. Yet beneath that looseness lies careful design: organs and saxophones trade melodies with conversational ease, while hard-panned flutes enter halfway through like a ghostly chorus marker. When the kick drum briefly drops out and the saxophone re-enters, it signals not chaos but transformation—a subtle kind of tension and release that replaces their older, forward-only propulsion.
Throughout Inland See, the electronic fabric that once dominated—those bubbling synths and intricate sequences from “Jammu” or “Amorpha”—is now more like atmosphere, a soft glow beneath the acoustic interplay. On “Reno,” that shift is striking: the synths hum in the background like heat mirages, while the melody unfurls and folds back on itself, luminous as fireflies in a dark forest. “Keiji Dreams,” meanwhile, stretches across eight unhurried minutes, the instruments orbiting one another with space and curiosity rather than compulsion.
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The band saves its most transcendent moment for the closer, “Graut.” At 18 minutes, it’s a journey in itself—beginning in vaporous drift before locking into a kosmische groove that slowly bends and swings. It’s playful, even sly; halfway through, the rhythm dips into a pulse that feels equal parts new age and ’90s R&B, a blend that’s fresh territory for Bitchin Bajas. Recorded after months of touring these ideas live, the song captures the trio’s core philosophy in motion: repetition not as stasis, but as discovery.
Every moment in Inland See feels infinite, but never static. The Bajas have always known that change doesn’t need to announce itself loudly; it can arrive quietly, inside the loop, like a shimmer at the edge of perception. On this album, they sound freer than ever—still exploring eternity, but now with melody as their compass.
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