Joshua Abrams, born in Philadelphia in 1973 and based in Chicago since the mid 1990s, is a bassist, composer and multi-instrumentalist and a central figure of the city's experimental and jazz scenes. He has played with Tortoise, Hamid Drake, Roscoe Mitchell, Nicole Mitchell and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and worked extensively as a film composer. He is best known for leading Natural Information Society, built around the guimbri, the three-stringed bass lute of Moroccan Gnawa music, whose hypnotic, minimalism-rooted grooves have won wide acclaim on albums such as Simultonality and the collaboration with Evan Parker.