Jazz meets electronica: London-based Belgian harpist Nala Sinephro elegantly blends the two elements on “Endlessness.”
Steps to Success: Nala Sinephro Photo: Kristofyan
The synthesizer sounds like it’s coming from a game console, in an arpeggio form. The chords are played in rapid succession, not simultaneously. This motif is often heard on the additional tracks of the second album by Nala Sinephro, a Belgian harpist and jazz composer based in London. The album title, ‘Endlessness’, in particular, means ‘infinity’ in German.
On the opening track, “Continuum 1” (the other nine have exactly the same title and are numbered to distinguish them), the warm, airy, fluttering sax of James Mollison (Ezra Collective) soon settles into arpeggio counterpoint.
Over the next 45 minutes, motifs sometimes appear in the foreground, sometimes fade away, and sometimes reappear as if they had been seen before. Sometimes, as in the track “Continuum 8,” they are played slowly as templates for drum patterns, or played as instruments.
Plucking a nerve with a harp
Sinephro’s excellent debut album “Space 1.8” (2021), an elegant and sublime blend of jazz and electronic ambient sounds, struck a chord with audiences in the second year of the pandemic with ease. None of the enthusiastic album reviews could avoid praising Sinephro’s captivating yet soothing music as meditative or even therapeutic, comparing it to the spiritual jazz of Alice Coltrane.
Nala Cinepro: “Endless” (Warp/Rough Trade/Indigo)
However, Sinephro seems to have heard of the American jazz artist long after he had fallen in love with the harp. The 28-year-old Belgian, who has been involved in London’s busy jazz scene for some time, calls his music-making “therapeutic” and has reported in interviews that his synthesizer is tuned to a frequency of 432 Hz, which guarantees clarity, inner peace, etc.
Sinephro approached her follow-up album quite differently, perhaps out of fear of being left in the drawer. She doesn’t want to make music a relaxation app. The multi-instrumentalist and self-taught artist is too experimental for that. And finally, it has to do with her eclectic socializing, which always shines through on her UK online radio show NTS.
Jam session instead of lecture
She grew up in a family that loved music. Her mother was a piano teacher and her father was a saxophonist from the Caribbean. As a young girl, she threw herself into the hardcore techno scene in Brussels. She later moved to London to study jazz. She quit jazz after three weeks. Jam sessions with the local jazz scene proved more effective. She soon began working closely with saxophonist Nubya Garcia.
The new album features wild improvisations from Afrojazz band Kokoroko trumpeter Sheila Maurice-Gray, drummer Morgan Simpson, formerly of Black Midi, and Edward Wakili-Hick (Sons of Kemet).
Sinephro describes her musical practice as “an exercise in simplicity,” but this time she allows herself a bit of chaos, something she and her fellow activists always strive to resolve. The songs on the new album are never uniform, but they are hard to tell apart. It’s a lake of sound, turbulent on its surface, but always trying to find balance, like water.
Sinephro succeeds in giving a fresh perspective to the instrument with its vivid imagery. Her harp playing does not offer the cliché expression of distant melodies, but seems almost agitated. The strings do not cause excessive sugar, but rather create a cool coolness.
And the arpeggio motif not only serves as an anchor, but is constantly recontextualized, even if Sinephro’s consistent conceptualization sometimes gets a little tiring. But over the long haul, she has managed to achieve a remarkable balancing act with “Endlessness.” A track that is almost unclassifiable, closer to avant-garde electronica than ambient, it is precise and expansive at the same time.
