Harmony Holiday
In the composer’s second album, the poetry of continuums connects the past with new beginnings.
Endlessness, by Nala Sinephro, Warp Records
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Dread of delightful turns of fate, like healing, divine justice, and true love, is often disguised as dread of loss or failure. What peace do we sacrifice to succeed in a Western context we know is at least part open-air sanatorium, and at best possibly a covert insane asylum in its entirety, hiding primal screams in the symbolic amenities of the make-believe luxury condominium we’re all promised if we can endure enough chaotic sterility. Nihilism is a safe-room for the dejected spirit here, tentative and cautious about its terms of engagement with the collective psychosis called success, or the dream. Our dread of the catastrophic becomes the decoy we use to call it forth, to make it our scapegoat, when we realize their dream matches our nightmare bar for bar. Nala Sinephro was keenly aware of this brittle collective limboing between optimism and dread, at least subconsciously, while composing and recording her debut album, Space 1.8 (2021), a dirgelike algorithm for transcendence she created a few years after a tumor was discovered in her jaw, and she survived. She’d recently relocated from Belgium to London, was woodshedding often with a burgeoning community of improvisers, and grappling with the gauntlet of second chances. We’re supposed to perform obscene gratitude when we escape death or disease, but what if we carry everything we’ve escaped with us, as haunt, quiet rage, unresolved tension with God or spirit or some yet-unnamed realm, which has named us its marks? Space 1.8 channels the displaced whimsy of a healthy survival instinct, one that interrogates the soul to discover what it’s made of, and confronts the terror unearthed there, and the grace, with lush, unabashedly reverent harp chords and synths that collapse them as if into rubble—the ruins created by the phoenix so she has something to emerge from, to demonstrate her elevation and lend us some. Sinephro’s debut is a jazz funeral for the former self.
She began playing harp in secret, stealing chances in her high-school band room while her classmate’s instrument was left unattended. The harp, though ancient and likely native to the Nile Valley, has an aristocratic, almost prissy reputation in the Western world, and members of the diaspora in the West are expected to avoid identification with such elite and decadent instruments. But the harp is also a black poem, a posthumous love letter Alice Coltrane received as shipment from John Coltrane after his death, and would practice on past when blood cried from her fingertips and hunger had been resolved by the strings’ reverb. The afro-horn was the newest axe to cut the dead wood of the world, writer Henry Dumas proclaims in his afro-psychedelic short story about the policing and ungovernability of black music, in which he invents this mythic instrument and makes it mystical artillery, a weapon against appropriation and the spectacularized white gaze. When black Detroit-born harpist Dorothy Ashby called her album Afro-Harping (1968), I hear her echoing Dumas, reinventing his axe the year he was killed by police on his way home. Ashby cuts through a stolen history with her brave hyphen, and reveals blues blood trapped and mishandled on those strings as if tripping over a tightrope. And Sinephro happens upon the strung-up axe as a clandestine jewel peeking out from the austere corpses of Protestant decorum. She does not see herself as a harpist, she states clearly; she considers herself a composer first. Watching her live at the Masonic Lodge, a music venue positioned inside of LA’s Hollywood Forever cemetery near the graves of any number of misapprehended black entertainers, the harp like a guardrail on the stage populated by synthesizers and a three-piece band, it’s clear that the world won’t be able to unsee the image of her cutting down false borders with the understated brazenness of one who knows what she is made for so well she doesn’t need our interpretations.
Nala Sinephro. Courtesy Shore Fire Media. Photo: Kris Tofjan.
This brings us to Sinephro’s sophomore album, Endlessness, out now on Warp Records, which she played from a recent midsummer evening in this cemetery lodge, and which quantum-jumps from Space 1.8’s sullen mysticism into arpeggiated swooning and near rejoicing. The blues appetite is abandoned as Sinephro spirals up into at-times ribald, at-times subdued reveling in a vast unknown and unknowable horizon, a new beginning. In places, the new arrangements conjure someone freshly weaned off a dark habit, and brightness almost giggles, fawns over itself. Every track carries the same title and is numbered to denote sequence. She’s joined by seven instrumentalists and twenty-one string players on the record. The large ensemble is held together by an arpeggio that feels at first like a doodle but, as it weaves through the album, quickens and assumes the urgency of sirens. It’s playful and swirling, then a warning, then a war cry, then a smirk, then smuggled, almost histrionic joy. Like the refrain in an epic poem, the music’s valence changes connotations as the story unfolds. But on Endlessness, the story is difficult to detect, and cannot be narrativized. It’s a soundtrack ahead of its film, a miracle we praise ahead of its arrival to lure it closer, and we are left in the territory of our personal biases and projections while we wait for proof of the never-ending event that the album insinuates.
The first personalization I indulge involuntarily is a refrain I carry around when in the highest of spirits: what is all this joy and justice? The first track makes space for a saxophone solo so yearning it yanks the question from me with an abrupt yes, this is all this joy and justice, ambiguous about its duration. There’s a call and response between moods that gasps in satisfaction when its will and its insight align in the music. To have achieved this as a composer, Sinephro had to insist upon a virtually egoless mode, one manifestly answering a calling beyond the range of one single soul or being. The piano intervenes like distant, then approaching, footsteps and affirms it again in the second continuum, yes, here is all this joy and justice. The strings loom, here it is. The listening body sways in acknowledgment, vibrates, allows the symphonic radiance to enter it on a molecular level. We eat from the tree of knowledge we were never meant to reach. We ingest the whimsy we’ve been asked to trade for oracular intensity to satisfy the narrow and nullifying projections of the liberal imagination in the land where success is a manner of being broken in, house-trained, et cetera, et cetera, toward austere indifference to pleasure. The survivor’s hedonism becomes her discipline, she resolutely focuses on a brand-new, yet-to-be-commodified feeling, which she will both invent and define. A novel semiotics is wished for openheartedly, beckoned from atop its sage-hill to greet the seeker. By “Continuum 3,” we hear voices, a choral blurring of virtues and vices converging with brisk, reverent changes on electric piano, testimony gutted, gushing. Temporary release from the trauma economy. Remember the axe, emergent and disruptive with new rhythm across the ensemble; it’s a de facto star system, and the dead wood of the world is the hide of the talking drum it carves, not cut but struck by strings huddling over it to make a shadow dematerialize, to shame the devil by calling its name backward.
Nala Sinephro. Courtesy Shore Fire Media.
By the seventh listen, letting go bit by bit of the familiarity kinks of my personal ego and will, surrendering by degrees to the will of the music, I realize what’s occurring—we’re exerting sincere effort to domesticate the asylum that has tried to conquer us, to create a culture that seduces us away from fetishized despair. The new dread, the new beauty, is that it’s working. Satisfaction is terrifying, success is. What we wanted to catastrophize we might end up baptizing in the salve of our blood and laughter, and loving deliriously into submission to real intimacy. The instruments we were once denied might become our mother tongues, second nature, our poems returned from exile. Will this make us black aristocrats, or collapse the aristocracy as our passions lead us to forgiving its trespasses? Or emulating them? A continuum demands some clones of the past in the future, some ghosts, some chaperones between dimensions, and some thrashes of this mutant and unimpeachable happiness Sinephro encodes in song with the range of a misfit angel getting over herself.
Harmony Holiday is the author of several collections of poetry and numerous essays on music and culture. Her collection Maafa came out in April 2022.