Nala Sinephro brings fresh, spiritual sounds to the harp at Stoke Newington album launch

Nala Sinephro, the composer, harp player, and synthesizer maestra transported her audience from Stoke Newington to an effervescent, far-reaching beyond in celebration of her debut album release, Space 1.8 (Warp Records). Errol and Alex Rita of Touching Bass, the South London-based club night, concert series, record label and NTS Radio show, set the mood with DJ sets before and after, setting our heads for the journey we were about the embark on.

Nala, resplendent in lime green satin, took the stage with her band: James Mollison (tenor sax, pictured below), Wonky Logic (synthesizers), and Edward Wakili-Hick (drums). She plunged into the first set, taking everyone with her, weaving shimmering glissandos with heavy, low thrumming in a nine-minute solo. When Wonky Logic came in with bass, it was slow and subtle, seeping into a deep drone. Nala moved off the harp onto her own bank of synths, programming multi-planar, all-encompassing sounds, often unconfined by any strict rhythm but full of movement from the soundwaves themselves. I wondered if we could hear (but nonetheless sense) everything: one of Nala’s influences is the frequency emitted by the Perseus black hole, a B-flat 57 octaves below middle C. While drafting this account of the night, I was wary of overdoing the outer space and celestial descriptors, but it is hard to convey the music’s expansiveness scale without them.

The night was an emotional slow burn. Catharsis in two unbroken 40-minute sets came from the patient merging and welling of sounds. In the second half, Mollison’s sparse, melancholy lines achingly built over Wonky Logic’s and Nala’s analogue tones, which in turn morphed into an insistent bassline paralleling Wakili-Hick's drums, deep and round as timpani, feather-light cymbals creating distance, gradually-almost surprisingly-building into an even march. Mollison’s lines seemed to take heart from this, and the last ten minutes of the evening elevated into an prismatic, primal optimism before tapering off into a single breath, a low elliptical pulsing – the passing signal of a lone satellite.

St. Matthias, a 165-year old gothic revival church, did psychoacoustic justice to the music – the high, arched ceilings gave the space for sound to travel and envelop the listeners on the wooden pews. Stone pillars blocked the views of the remaining seats by the time I arrived, so I leaned against a radiator off to the side. This ended up being a good choice, as I could see both the band and audience soaking in the sounds, transfixed. Barely anyone took their phones out. One listener in the front row began meditating, or perhaps levitating, moving her hands in slow circles, giving shape to the to the sonic world we were immersed in.

Music so vast could feel lonely, but the sense of smallness one feels listening to Nala’s music is humbling and reassuring; the magnitudes of beauty we can create are unbounded.