Joshua AbramsMagnetoception (2026 Remastered) Vinyl 2LP

A new edition of Joshua Abrams' 2015 2LP magnum opus Magnetoception is at last here. Out-of-print on vinyl for a decade+, Magnetoception is the third album, and first double album, in the saga of Natural Information Society. In a Berwyn, Illinois attic, February 2013, Abrams, guitarists Emmett Kelly, and Jeff Parker, and grand master drummer Hamid Drake gathered around vintage Neumanns and a woodstove to record the nucleus of Magnetoception live to 2-track. Beamed-in over the next year at Abrams' Chicago home studio were Lisa Alvarado's harmonium, Ben Boye's electric autoharp, Drake's conga drum, and solo pieces by Abrams for harp and clarinet. Thanks to Marc Masters championing the album for Pitchfork's bygone column The Out Door and its appearance in The Wire's 2015 Rewind, Magnetoception moved the project from the recesses of the underground into realms of greater visibility. From the 2015 eremite press release: The artist's first large scale work on vinyl, Magnetoception began as a commission by Eremite for Abrams to make a double LP based in extended performances by an ensemble of Abrams, guitarists Emmett Kelly and Jeff Parker, and drummer Hamid Drake. Abrams's compositions are a fascinating nexus of ideas from non-western traditional musics, minimalism and jazz designed to catalyze his musicians toward a single groupmind organism of sound. On his 2012 album Represencing Abrams presented his music in capsule-length pieces realized by duo and trio groupings drawn from a pool of a dozen musicians. Magnetoception presents one ensemble methodically unfolding his compositions over longer durations. The performances intricately layer rhythm, melody and drone into sonic textiles of extraordinary expressive breadth, by turns dense or spacious, repetitive or indeterminate, clattering or placid. 2026 Eremite edition pressed by Fidelity Record Pressing from new lacquers cut by Kevin Gray at Cohearent (Sterling Sound cut the 2015 edition). Presented in a non-gatefold matte jacket featuring Lisa Alvarado's o.g. artwork.

"The members of Natural Information Society craft Abrams' songs like painters composing a landscape, or bricklayers constructing a building, with patience and devotion that values long goals over immediate gratification. Inside these calm journeys lie new sonic revelations, which might not have come in shorter durations." --Mark Masters, Pitchfork

"Patient, layered music that's always heading somewhere, sometimes spare and sometimes complex and shimmering." --Ben Ratliff, New York Times

"A fever dream of new American music with an international & historically wayward umbilical to non-western idioms & 20th century minimalism." --David Keenan, The Wire

"Certain passages remind us of a slow-core version of Tony Williams Lifetime. But other big chunks --especially those where Josh's strings take the lead-- come off more as some previously unknown Eastern European prog monster getting into deep roots expansionism." --Bryon Coley & Thurston Moore, Bull Tongue