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.
