Nala Sinephro shines at Barbican with mesmerising live show

Arranged in a meditative semi-circle, Nala Sinephro and four accompanying musicians performed almost two hours of unbroken music last Friday at the Barbican Centre. The enigmatic composer, harpist, synthesist and producer performs infrequently, and was met with a sold-out, anticipatory, near 2000-strong crowd, gathered to celebrate her latest release, Endlessness. 

The performance incorporated ideas from the album, all while channelling Sinephro’s home brew of post-minimalism, ecstatic spiritual jazz, space age soundtrack, and ambient. Yet it was also a slight departure, with an added exploratory, non-linear feel. Solo harp served as a starting point and as a periodic section marker throughout. Waves of seamless cadenzas flowed out, periodically broken up by slightly more jagged, koto-like arpeggios. After a period of timelessness, Dwayne Kilvington’s synth bass joined in at a slow tread, followed by Edward Wakili-Hick on drums, introducing a walking groove. Sinephro then pivoted from harp to synthesiser, gradually moulding a cluster of notes across several octaves. Her music is motivic by nature; patterns of notes are repeated, hypnotically-so, but with slight adjustments in rhythm, range, tone and feel, evoking both groundedness and momentum. Larger shifts, like the introduction of a synth bass groove, feel like the heady drop in a dance track, or to be more metaphoric, like a cosmic alignment of the spheres. 

A similar moment of catharsis took place later on, when Chelsea Carmichael began gently tracing bluesy patterns on tenor saxophone. Other band members fell away until only Sinephro’s harp remained, channelling a reimagined communion between the Coltranes. In fact, this positive use of space was a feature throughout the set. Apart from Sinephro’s gradual ebbing and flowing, mainly on synthesisers, other band members drifted in and out of the shared soundscape. It’s a reserved manner of playing not often expressed among jazz musicians of such virtuosity. When Lyle Barton’s keys came to the forefront half-way through, after a great deal of sitting back, his chord progressions were all the more impactful in their understated expressiveness. 

Space also means dynamics, and towards the end, Sinephro slowly, patiently, brought down her harp arpeggios, a long, drawn-out, book-end to the performance. The spell was abruptly broken by an ill-timed phone alarm, a jolt back to reality which elicited some anxious laughs. A reminder that outside the soothing balm of Sinephro’s music, an unpredictable world awaits.