The Chicago psych trio’s loops and layers seem to play tricks on time: Long songs fly by quickly, and short pieces feel expansive.
Chicago’s Bitchin Bajas make languid, slowly developing music, relying on boundless repetition rather than big changes to move forward. But compared to previous full-lengths—like 2014’s 76-minute self-titled album and 2017’s 80-minute Bajas Fresh—Bajascillators is surprisingly compact. On each of the four tracks, Cooper Crain, Rob Frye, and Dan Quinlivan start with minimal loops, add concentric layers, and crest into multiphonic bliss. They still stretch and float, utilizing a score of instruments including keyboards, reeds, and woodwinds. But everything here is focused and relatively efficient, making for a sharp distillation of the band’s core strengths. If you could squeeze 47 minutes of music onto a 7", Bajascillators would fit that format well.
Time has always been a malleable concept for Bitchin Bajas. Their open-ended approach lets sounds grow but never stagnate, so the trio can make long songs seem to fly by quickly and short pieces feel expansive. On Bajascillators, each track is roughly the same length—the shortest runs nearly 10 minutes, the longest 14—yet each one facilitates a significantly different temporal perception. Opener “Amorpha” hits the ground running with a mesh of marimba-style loops— aided by Laurie Spiegel's Music Mouse software—and sprints toward the finish line. That’s followed by the airy, glacial “Geomancy,” whose sparse tones and deliberately paced chords evoke a film slowed down to the point where you can see the shift between each frame.
When it comes to messing with perception, the most dazzling piece on Bajascillators is “World B. Free.” Named after a legendary basketball player who himself seemed to defy the laws of physics, the piece starts distant and subtle, with a high-pitched drone slowly crawling in from the horizon, as if the track were an extension of “Geomancy.” A few minutes in, a circling synth slips under a clarinet-like melody, and the loops begin to multiply. Soon, innumerable sounds are crossing paths and spawning new patterns, and “World B. Free” clicks into a busy pace. Then it fades again, melting into echoing chimes and dying trails, like the last evidence of a rocket shot into space.
Many of those kinds of sparks and embers on Bajascillators are heard best through headphones. Playing in the background, the album can come off as merely soothing, but get up close and you’ll notice many more patterns and curves than the surface suggests. That effect is clearest on closer “Quakenbrück,” the catchiest cut here. Driven forward by the drumming of guest Rex McMurry, it rapidly grows into motorik space -rock, sounding like classic Bajas as well as the band McMurry shares with Crain and Frye, Cave. If that means this isn’t a big change of pace from the trio’s previous work, that’s no problem. Bitchin Bajas’ music is about keeping on, and Bajasicllators does that as well as anything in their discography.
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