Skip to main content

Space 1.8

Nala Sinephro's debut album Space 1.8 could have been among my favourite records of 2021, if it weren't for its initial issue being vinyl-only. Having heard a few tracks from it on-line, it seemed to me like music that could easily sound a little better on CD (and it would be cheaper too). So I waited - and my patience was rewarded when a re-issue early this year brought forth CD copies as well as more vinyl ones. In that way it has become one of my favourite records of 2022. I've listened to it many times and feel very far from exhausting its delights.

At Discogs, the album has been categorised as "Contemporary Jazz, Ambient" which seems about right. There are saxophones and double basses and drums involved, and a few tracks are unquestionably jazzy - but there are also other textures too, courtesy of Sinephro's mastery of two highly unalike instruments: the harp and the modular synthesizer, which both excel at laying on soothing ambience. All eight tracks are instrumentals composed by Sinephro, and are simply named 'Space 1' to 'Space 8'. On the former, and on 'Space 7', she provides all of the music herself, whereas on 'Space 2', she is part of a sextet.

On other "Spaces" there is a guest, or two, or three. Those helping out include saxophonist Nubya Garcia and guitarist Shirley Tetteh. The prevailing mood is of clarity & serenity, but other feelings intrude too, such as in the anxious-sounding 'Space 6'. At the last, though, calm prevails, in the 20-minute expanse of 'Space 8', in which the listener is kept blissfully afloat on soft pillows of comfortable sound.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4.  An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ein Schattenspiel, etc.

Georg Friedrich Haas is a contemporary Austrian composer of "art music". "Haas's style recalls that of György Ligeti in its use of micropolyphony, microintervals and the exploitation of the overtone series; he is often characterized as a leading exponent of spectral music" says wikipedia. Only a relative few of his many compositions have been issued on CD - many more of them can be found on YouTube. On this 2020 disc are three of his works in which standard classical instrumentation is augmented and altered by "live electronics". Two are string quartets and one is for solo piano. Is a string quartet still really a quartet if there are meanwhile some other people with laptops busily twizzling the sound? There is a live performance video of the 'String Quartet No. 7', the first work on the disc, where the JACK Quartet are supplemented by a trio of sound boffins to realise the composition. Whether it's properly a quartet or a septet is neithe...
Post a Comment
Read more