As a Midwesterner, the older you get, the more you realize that the rest of the world is missing out by not experiencing the region’s life-affirming sigh into autumn. It affords one the chance to reflect on the summer that just passed, as well as tidy up the present in anticipation of not only a frigid hibernation, but the new year around the bend. The duo of albums that came this summer from Bitchin Bajas and CAVE (both on Drag City) define this shift in our cycle as much as they define the current state of Chicago psychedelia. Approach them 20 years from now and they’ll still sound like the past and future simultaneously.

In 2013, it was the summer of discovery (as opposed to past summers of violence and debauchery), if simply because I happened to bring these artifacts back from a sick weekend spent in a hearty Chicago neighborhood. I found that Cooper Crane, who works Bitchin Bajas as his meditative solo outlet, has an affinity for bands like Oneida and tapes made of Cumbia from Medellin. There weren’t discussions about fascinations with Eno or the excellently shambolic Running record he just produced. Instead, I took a fresh copy of Bitchitronics as translation of the answers, as an emblem of Crane taking the voyage of “pure” music further down the road.

Like a prism, looking into Crane’s work, you’re never going to hear the same thing twice, even if his mettle here is based solely in loops on top of loops. There’s always discovery in each successive spin of Bitchitronics‘ “songs.” One must parenthesize that word, “songs,” as these are more mood pieces, textures, states of mind. Pure music deals in senses past the ears. The first track is called “Transcendence” after all. Records like these are played and the memories attached to them is what remains; the music drifts to the ether, but can always be repeated. Trade in boho mysticism, self-help seminars, and psychotropic drugs for ascension through “Sun City,” where Crane’s harmonic drones slowly suck the gravity from the room. By the time the record makes it to the nearly 17-minute “Turiya,” it might be babble to prescribe Bitchitronics as an agent of spirituality. Then again it completely inhabits its own spirituality, a mellow unlike most other new age recordings, and a high engaging more than the mind.

CAVE’s Threace though, makes use of the body. As much as this quartet gets compared to Kraut motorik-pioneers like Neu! and Can—which is certainly not a bad thing, as the world does need more motorik—Threace explores different realms and pushes all the buttons at the control panel. It boogies and choogles, swings and jerks.  At times, as on the initial hypnotics of “Sweaty Fingers,” CAVE borders on Kuti-esque funk before launching into a refrain befitting Hawkwind. “Arrow’s Myth” dabbles in fusion-psych akin to some Return to Forever meltdown in the pits of a wooly dive bar. The cosmic synergy the band has acquired, no doubt from endless jams, comes to a head on “Shikaakwa.” Shades of a million great head records—from the Soft Machine to Tortoise to Dungen—blur in and out of focus. As with Bitchitronics (and that shift in seasons), there’s a total duality to Threace and Cave’s approach. Songs go searching in unison, riding the mechanics of a group locked-in to a riff eternal, but each member steps out of themselves to lay nuance above the groove. It’s in this wayward traveling that sets them apart.

In the last throes of the summer of discovery, I got to see CAVE, highly intoxicated, play along the banks of the Great Ohio River. The sun had been set, nerves were wearing thin, and CAVE effortlessly took the crowd and myself, to another place. Like the Midwest is another place, like autumn, like only pure music can do.