The trance grooves of North African music have long held a fascination for certain outliers of the jazz avant-garde. In 1969, Archie Shepp famously collaborated with Algerian and Tuareg Diwan percussionists at the Pan African Festival in Algiers, and, in the 1990s, Pharoah Sanders recorded with Maleem Mahmoud Ghania, master of the three-stringed bass lute known as the guimbri, which forms the backbone of Morocco's deeply spiritual gnawa ritual music. Since around 2010, bass player, Joshua Abrams, has been pursuing a similar synthesis, devoting himself almost entirely to the guimbri and pulling in an amorphous cast of fellow Chicagoan musicians to help explore a freewheeling yet intensely concentrated combination of gnawa and jazz, informed by the endlessly recycling, interlocking patterns of American minimalism. Whereas previous albums featured ensembles specially convened for recording dates, this latest is the first to use a working group going under the name Natural Information Society, with all five tracks recorded in single takes in 2014 and 2015 while the band was on the road. You can certainly feel a more focused group energy at work. While 2015's acclaimed Magnetoception was a gentle affair, almost touching on ambient house in places, this latest is all about furious grooves, with the double drum team of Mikel Avery and Frank Rosaly laying down fat, tumbling rhythms over which Abrams spins rambling, heavily percussive guimbri figures. The final track, ‘21281/2 South Indiana’, brings Abrams' journey full circle: named after the address of Chicago's legendary Velvet Lounge club, where Abrams worked as house bassist in the 1990s, it swaps guimbri for double bass, beginning with a loose group improvisation before settling into a deep bass hook worthy of Alice Coltrane's Journey In Satchidananda, and setting the stage for Ari Brown's dreamy tenor solo. Even when he's looking backwards, Abrams takes more risks than most.