You might have believed that Promises, the extraordinary ambient jazz album by Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the LSO, would have had few rivals this year. But a contender has emerged.
The debut album by the London-based composer and harpist Nala Sinephro reaches elegiac heights – and tissue-penetrating depths. Space 1.8 (out via Warp) is a healing sound bath full of rigorous psychoacoustic knowledge and elegant playing. It combines live instruments by notable names in the UK’s young jazz scene (percussion by Sons of Kemet’s Edward Wakili-Hick, for instance) with modular synths and multilayered audio processing by Sinephro, adding an otherworldly thrum.
That precis doesn’t do justice to her process, or to the end result. Any cosmic jazz harpist can’t help but recall Alice Coltrane; Sinephro’s music is also rich with the consciousness of planetary alignments, and “the frequencies emitted by the Perseus black hole – a B flat note 57 octaves below middle C and far beyond the hearing range of humans”, notes the biography that accompanies this release.
Although knitted into the London scene, Sinephro grew up in between the birdsong of Belgium and the humid tropical soundscapes of Martinique. In her early 20s she saw off a tumour, informing her interest in music as medicine: Space 1.8 is a deeply restorative addition to 2021’s auditory first aid kit. Joy heals too: here, Space 4 was recorded with Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painting of the Sumerian goddess Ishtar presiding over the session, Nubya Garcia’s sax echoing his bold brushstrokes in sound.