Anyone who’s ever meditated or watched a Formula 1 race knows that movement and stillness can be the same thing. The thrill isn’t in the destination—it’s in tracing the same loop until the familiar starts to shimmer. The bullet-riddled stop sign on your daily route becomes sacred; when it’s replaced, the loss feels cosmic. Natural Information Society’s music lives in that paradox: rotating, not progressing; vibrating, not climbing. Across the past decade, Joshua Abrams’ ensemble has turned repetition into revelation, blending the sacred thrum of Moroccan gnawa with the circular transcendence of Coltrane’s spiritual jazz and the hypnotic austerity of Philip Glass. Their songs don’t seek release so much as alignment—the kind of pleasure that comes not from escape but from remaining, attentive, inside the spin.
Perseverance Flow, the group’s first solo outing since 2023’s expansive Since Time Is Gravity, tightens the aperture. If that record was a panoramic scroll of cosmic jazz—a long view of dunes, winds, and movement—then Perseverance Flow is the close-up of a single grain of sand. The album unfolds around one endlessly looped theme: a two-note harmonium figure, Abrams’ guembri pulsing beneath, Mikel Patrick Avery’s percussion clicking like bones, a bass clarinet tracing heraldic arcs above. Thirty-five minutes pass and the band hardly shifts their posture, yet the details constantly breathe. Having played the piece live for a year before recording, the ensemble’s rapport feels telepathic; it’s the sound of musicians inhaling and exhaling as one. Imagine the Sun Ra Arkestra stripped to a mantra, stuck on a single measure until it becomes transcendental.
Abrams recorded the performance in one take, then sculpted it like a dub producer, dropping subtle edits and rhythmic inversions with jeweler’s precision. What looks static at a distance glitters up close—every shimmer a recalibration. At first, the harmonium is steady and priestly; then Lisa Alvarado inverts the pattern, playing its mirror image so gracefully you almost miss the flip. A few minutes later, Avery’s percussion loosens into what sounds like pebbles tumbling in a jar, dissolving back into rhythm before you can separate accident from intent. Abrams anchors the ritual with his guembri—sometimes tightening the rope, sometimes letting it sway, but never breaking the trance.
Repetition in lesser hands can drain meaning, but Perseverance Flow never loses its pulse. The groove stretches just enough to feel like breath, the harmonium momentarily transforming into a slow-motion Cajun accordion. Even at its most minimal, the music feels kinetic—you could thread a needle with its rhythm. Around the 19-minute mark, the group seems to stop together, as if acknowledging the loop itself, before diving right back in. It’s the smallest, most thrilling climax: the moment when awareness itself becomes the hook.
You can hear the ghost of Chicago dance music and Jamaican dub here, too—tiny syncopations and ghost claps that tug the loop toward the body. Abrams’ bass movements flirt with footwork’s liquid syncopation, while distant drum thumps mimic the muffled insistence of a club heard from down the block. The music never fully turns to dance, but it keeps the body in orbit. Two-thirds through, Avery taps a kick drum like a heartbeat behind a wall, and for a fleeting second the piece splits in two: meditative ritual and ecstatic groove coexisting in the same breath.
Writers love to compare repetition to Buddhist impermanence or Zeno’s paradox, and sure—this album can hold its own in a philosophy seminar. But there’s something simpler, even playful, about its return. Merry-go-rounds go in circles, too. So do windmills, turntables, and baseball seasons. Perseverance Flow may speak the language of academia, but its pleasures are earthy, even communal. It’s experimental music that remembers the body—that rewards deep listening the way a familiar route rewards familiarity. Each rotation brings you closer not to an ending, but to a kind of joyful, perpetual knowing. Like all great loops, it gets better every time you come back around.
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