Endlessness, Nala Sinephro’s second record, centers on an arpeggio. The London-based composer modulates this ascendant phrase, extends it, plays it more lento, and lets it slip into inaudibility and disappear. It carries us like a rip tide through the album’s 10 tracks, all called “Continuum”—a perfect name for each, though this LP isn’t a series of variations on a single composition. Listen closely, and its details transform at a relentless clip. Let your mind drift, and its 45 minutes resemble a lake: broad, serene, consistent if never flat.
The 28-year-old, raised on the outskirts of Brussels by a Belgian mother and a father with roots in Martinique and Guadeloupe, has both ambient music’s cool breeze and jazz’s strong winds at her back. She emerged as the union of these genres was finally losing its hyphen, during the COVID-marooned days of 2021. Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders’ Promises arrived in March, an event that paired the electronic perfectionist on the same bill as the elder-statesman saxophonist, along with the London Symphony Orchestra. Sinephro’s sparkling debut, Space 1.8, dropped in September of the same year, as though she knew a mantle was waiting to be taken up. She had recorded the disc in 2018 and 2019, but that only made her arrival more uncanny—when was the last time that a couple of jazz records, put out mere months apart, seemed to be talking to each other, disagreeing, finding common ground, and cogitating over a future for the form?
Still, Sinephro scopes out the frontier. Endlessness dissolves the binaries that define ambient jazz and imagines a third sort of music that thrives at their midpoint. Its seamlessness distinguishes Sinephro’s second album from its still excellent predecessor, which was alternately atmospheric and bluesy. This is more cohesive, more elegant. Endlessness merges sensibilities with the naturalness of DNA strands bonding into a double helix. It both proves ambient jazz’s endurance and renders the two terms mutually redundant.
Sinephro has grown considerably as a studio brain and bandleader in the last five years. She produced and mixed every song on Endlessness, engineering them with collaborator Rick David. She also arranged all of the record’s strings—never saccharine or maudlin, they feel poignant and as judicious as any other instrumental feature. Sinephro plays harp, piano, and synths both modular and otherwise alongside a who’s who of friends from South London’s jazz scene. Endlessness’ soul is the energy of the session, the ability of musicians in a room to swap ideas in real time.
