Nala Sinephro: Endlessness – heavenly harp swaps easy ambience for agitation

You might assume that you know what to expect from Nala Sinephro’s second album. Its Brussels-born, London-based author is noted for making music that exists where experimental electronica abuts the renewed interest in late-60s/early 70s “spiritual” jazz that underpinned the London jazz renaissance of recent years. A contemporary of Shabaka Hutchings and Nubya Garcia – the latter is a regular collaborator – it was perhaps inevitable that Sinephro would attract comparisons to the late Alice Coltrane, given that her main acoustic instrument is the pedal harp, although Sinephro apparently took it up, and indeed started work on her debut album, 2021’s Space 1.8, long before hearing any of the godmother of spiritual jazz’s oeuvre.
And much has been made of the mystical qualities of Sinephro’s work. She has talked of her music as having “medicinal” aspects: one profile noted that all the synthesisers in her home studio were tuned to 432Hz, a frequency that’s reputed to induce everything from pain relief to relaxation to improved mental clarity. The word “meditative” tended to crop up a lot in reviews of Space 1.8: as if to underline the point, when a critic from Jazzwise magazine was dispatched to one of her live shows after its release, they reported back that some members of the audience appeared to be meditating as she performed. Given all that, and the fact that Endlessness – which features not only Garcia, but a host of other luminaries from the same scene, among them Ezra Collective saxophonist James Mollison, Kokoroko bandleader Sheila Maurice-Grey and former Black Midi drummer Morgan Simpson – bills itself as “a deep dive into the cycle of existence”, you would be forgiven for expecting a slightly more robust, sax-heavy take on the kind of music you get served up by relaxation apps.
There are points during Endlessness’s 45 minutes – divided into 10 parts, each called Continuum – that feel pacific and soothing. Continuum 4 and 5 set Sinephro’s piano and softly undulating synthesiser against pillowy orchestration and Garcia’s gently exploratory sax: somewhere deep in the mix lurk what sound like echoing vocals, wordless and lulling. But, in truth, those moments feel more like interludes than the album’s main emotional thrust. During lockdown, Sinephro helmed an admirably eclectic radio show on NTS, the playlist of which attempted to join the dots between J Dilla and Frederick Delius, Cocteau Twins and Cannonball Adderley, but the sound of Endlessness frequently seems more interested in examining the tensions between different types of music, notably the natural swing of jazz players and the clipped, machine-tooled precision of programmed synth arpeggios. Most dramatically, on Continuum 1, the synthesiser blips metronomically, while Simpson’s drums speed up and slow down and eventually break into a rhythm that seems to have no connection to the electronics.
Even when the programmed electronics and the live musicians are ostensibly working in concert, you’re aware of a friction between them. A lot of the analogue synth sounds Sinephro deploys are ascetic and slightly abrasive – they sometimes recall the “hauntological” electronica with which the Ghost Box label evokes distant memories of old Radiophonic Workshop soundtracks – and they snag against the warmth of the acoustic instruments. On Continuum 8, where the arpeggio slows down and acts as a cue for a drum pattern that’s somewhere between slow-motion funk and the rimshot-heavy rhythms of reggae, there’s still a very faint, but detectable jar between them. Similarly, the orchestrations are lush and beautiful, but they occasionally feel as if they are slipping their moorings, deliberately breaking loose from their supporting role and overpowering the other instruments. Immersive as Endlessness is, it isn’t music that feels especially conducive to enjoying in a prone position, arriving as it does liberally flecked with passages that feel a little unsettling or overwhelming. You lose yourself in it without ever quite knowing where it’s going: it keeps the listener on their toes, rather than flat on their back.
None of this is intended as criticism: quite the opposite. All the push-and-pull between its constituent elements means Endlessness doesn’t succumb to chill-out cliches: the harp is an instrument we tend to automatically associate with celestial beauty, and while Sinephro isn’t afraid of a beatific glissando, there’s something hugely impressive about the way she makes the instrument sound agitated on Continuum 3.
It’s an album that’s never atonal or discordant – even its climax, Continuum 10, which features some particularly explosive drumming by Natcyet Wakili, deals in a melodic, euphoric kind of catharsis. But there’s a grit and a degree of uncertainty about the sound that keeps the listener alert: drifting off doesn’t feel like an option. If it is a deep dive into the cycle of existence, not everything it brings back to the surface is straightforwardly beautiful or wonder-inducing. It’s more complicated and interesting than that, and therein lies its strange, entrancing power.
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