After fifteen years of patient evolution, Natural Information Society has arrived at something resembling a perfect ecosystem. Perseverance Flow, their latest transmission, distills the expanded lineups of recent years back to the core quartet—Lisa Alvarado on harmonium, Mikel Patrick Avery on drums, Jason Stein on bass clarinet, and Joshua Abrams on guimbri—for one continuous 37-minute composition that feels less like an album than a living organism breathing in slow motion. This is NIS at their most formally experimental, pushing the patient hypnosis of albums like Since Time Is Gravity (which earned Pitchfork's Best Jazz & Experimental selection and Mojo's #1 Underground Album distinction) through the sonic funhouse of dub production. Where previous efforts invited guests like Evan Parker and William Parker to solo over composed materials, this time Abrams invited the recording studio itself as collaborator, working with engineer Greg Norman to mutate timbre and texture in real time.

The reference points Abrams cites—imagining the album "like a live extended realization of a Jaylib lost instrumental as remixed by Kevin Shields"—hint at the alchemy happening here. This is music that draws equally from John Coltrane's modal investigations, Chicago house's hypnotic repetitions, and the rhythmic intricacies of Lisbon's dance underground, all filtered through the meditative discipline that has become NIS's signature. But Perseverance Flow represents something beyond genre synthesis. The ensemble spent a year performing this piece in concert before entering Electrical Audio Studios at 11 AM and finishing in time to pick up their kids from school—the kind of casual mastery that only comes from complete immersion in the material. What emerged was music that refracts their signature overlapping rhythmic patterns through dub's spatial possibilities, creating what Abrams calls "a destruction myth and a creation myth of a soundworld together at once."

The core ensemble addresses Abrams' compositions with the discipline of orchestra musicians and the creativity of improvisers, but the real revelation here is how studio manipulation becomes compositional tool rather than cosmetic enhancement. Post-production techniques push deep into the heart of the music, distorting and reshaping instruments to create what The Wire calls "energetically nutritious supernatural information society."

Perseverance Flow arrives at a moment when many seek music as medicine, offering what Abrams describes as "skipping rope in slo-mo—a dance of cooperation to rally guts and humors and keep marching through pouring tears." This is music that grows stronger the deeper you travel into it, a soundworld that has learned to console and humor itself while extending the same grace to its listeners.