- Bitchin Bajas cover a lot of styles, styles with a bad reputation. From minimalism to spiritual jazz to ambient to new age to prog to kraut -well kraut doesn’t have such a terrible rep, does it?- but I hope you see where I’m going here. They all dwell in a zone of mystical wonder, a fantastical space. It’s a realm that is hyped by devotees as transcendental, a place of spiritual revelation and a thing of wonder. Critics by contrast accuse those revelations of being nothing more than hokum, long tracts of hooey that only deliver to hop-heads too addled to know much of anything at all.

Let’s present the Chicago instrumental trio’s new album and second full-length, Bajas Fresh, in evidence. Seven huge chunks of meditative splendour, are they intellectually rigorous, internally consistent nirvanas, or not? They’re such spacious constructions you may need to stick around a while to find out, as with the opening ten minutes of Jammu. It presents a scintillating krautrock, sparkling above a substrate of ambient warmth that gushes out the Bajas signature, relaxed sense of joy. As goofily pleasurable as it is, your brains won’t actually run out of your ears like so much melting caramel. The music builds and diminishes in waves and microscopic rhythmic patterns scatter through the regular kraut beats like little dust devils. Energy pulses and wanes through overlaid arpeggios until a final burst is grabbed by a drum kit and propelled to a breathless finish. Well, it’s only one track in, but I think of quite a few stylistic co-travellers whose workmanlike performances could benefit from a little study of the Bajas method.

Single Circles On Circles might have you worried you’re just in for more of the same and it is a little similar, but the title is a reference to the neat little rhythmic trick setting it apart: the band play beat loops of different lengths off against each other, warping in and out of phase, referencing the minimalism of Terry Riley, which was actually the dominant influence on the Baja’s first full-length.

Now, however, the band are keen to show you that Riley isn’t their only hero. They make it explicit by including a cover of Sun Ra’s Angels And Demons At Play. It’s a nice take: the Bajas celestial beings are, as you might expect, sleepier, less mischievous than Sun Ra’s snappy, funky creatures. There’s something majestic, even ominous about the new take which makes it really worthwhile.

The changes keep coming in Yonanguni -another ten minute behemoth- constructed out of endlessly skittering drum patterns against washing glisses of melody, rising to little peak  solos on guitar or flute before a long, gentle glide back to somnolence. It sounds to me like nothing so much as The Necks and good Necks too, if you know what I mean.

The single biggest cut amongst all of these monsters is 2303. It’s exactly that: twenty-three minutes and three seconds of undulating ambience. The gentlest of giants it moves so quietly you can barely ascertain it, one step away from sleep. The rich, g major harmony occasionally leans into the accidentals, imparting a sensation of awe and cosmic magnificence. Most importantly you never get the feeling that the trio have given into temptation and actually gone to sleep at the wheel: that movement -so nearly imperceptible- continues to provide a navigable trajectory from end to end.

Chokayo is a bit of a curious beast: collaged from blurts of pretty DIY synth, that are ever-so-slowly embellished with contributions from bass-sax, flute, other ephemeral synth flutterings and more. Like Jammu, percussion appears towards the climax, but instead of taking things to a photo finish the proceedings just continue to flow along, except with a much greater sense of body, like all the individual melodic tributaries have formed a mighty, harmonic river.

I think I might be wedded to that allegory, because final number Be Going eddies gently but hugely like a delta joining the sea (a bit like the end of Smetana's Moldau). A sax, borrowing some Colin Stetsonesque nuttiness plays distantly, across the vast outro. The background harmony kinks and sharpens, nearly warping into some film noir soundtrack, with the sax cutting sick in chiaroscuro moonlight. Then the whole thing plays out exactly how you thought it would, nine minutes before.

The Bajas have big canvases and they never want you to be bored, figuring out what they’re going to do with them. That speaks for the final send off here, but also for every track preceding it and, for that matter, the jewelry-box diversity of all the different styles across the record. It’s a pretty neat trick that in amongst all of it the band never stray from that same, warm, lazy, blase and relaxed mood. Bitchin Bajas grin at you like a cheshire cat that’s been stringing you along the whole way. They work in all these mystical, pseudo-intellectual styles, primed to say so much that’s not really very much at all; all the while, quietly, secretly, actually, giving you a whole lot indeed.

- Chris Cobcroft.