Composer Nala Sinephro’s extraordinary 2021 debut, Space 1.8, was stitched together by the then 22-year-old from multiplayer jams recorded in alignment with lunar cycles, fusing her keyboards and modular synth oscillations with jazz instrumentation – piano, saxophone, percussion and her own harp. Although the Belgian-born, London-based Sinephro balks at the “ambient jazz” label, her intuitive, “medicinal” music’s kinship to spiritual forbears such as Alice Coltrane remained palpable.
This follow-up stays in that same rarefied space but expands outward, involving a stellar array of contemporaries – among them, saxophonists Nubya Garcia and James Mollison (Ezra Collective), Sheila Maurice-Grey (Kokoroko) on flugelhorn and erstwhile Black Midi drummer Morgan Simpson. Although Sinephro’s trademark harp appears on only two tracks, there are arpeggios galore.
If the lineup sounds showy, this 10-track album is anything but, with contributors weaving sensitively in and out of each track’s central arpeggiation; there are more strings this time around, credited to 21 Orchestrate players. In this “audio diary of the 25th and 26th years of life”, Sinephro foregrounds the cycle of birth, death and rebirth – there’s even a newborn-like analogue cry on the seven-minute, piano-forward Continuum 2. But these beautiful, spacey, often playful pieces keep up a consistent mood of elegiac meditativeness, peaking in the frankly chipper Continuum 6, full of electro-acoustic joy.
