Nala Sinephro

Made against the odds while she was in dire need of self-care, the London-based harpist and composer’s album is an ambient jazz classic. She explains the healing, spiritual qualities of her work Under a cold, moonlit sky in south London’s Horniman Museum conservatory, Nala Sinephro is cradling her pedal harp like a child softly resting on her shoulder. With her eyes closed behind her wire-rimmed glasses, she begins to delicately pull her hands along its strings, creating enveloping glissandos that fill the candlelit room. In the corner of her eye a tear glistens. At only 25, she has had a circuitous journey to the harp. Raised in Belgium by her pianist mother, Sinephro developed her ear for instrumentation early, beginning on the piano before moving to fiddle, violin and even the bagpipes. At high school, the room she would practise music in housed a fellow student’s harp, which soon piqued her curiosity. “I was always fascinated by it, so I decided to secretly open its case up one day,” she says, smiling. “When I did, it was like seeing an elephant or a giraffe – it’s an instrument that comes from another time.” There followed two years of clandestine explorations with the borrowed instrument, as she found her way around its fiendishly complicated architecture by feeling and sound. “It was all very organic, and playing felt like refreshing an old memory, or a reincarnation,” she says. “Maybe I have a Celtic harpist in my ancestry who played in medieval times!” Yet Sinephro refrained from learning the instrument formally, opting to move to London in 2017 to study composition instead. Arriving in the city and swiftly dropping out of her university course after three weeks – “as a person of colour, I didn’t feel like there was enough space for me and for what I wanted to make in that school,” she explains – Sinephro soon found her own like-minded musical community via a network of jazz jam nights. Opportune timing meant her arrival coincided with increasing recognition of the new jazz scene that was emerging in London, and she fell in with one of its key players, saxophonist Nubya Garcia , as well as the collective Steam Down. “It was so open-hearted when I got here, I felt like I was heard and had a place to grow,” she says. “I was supported by a community and it ultimately made for a perfect setting for this album.” Sinephro soon wrote the first composition of Space 1.8: Space 4 – a collaboration with Garcia, who creates a swirling downtempo saxophone melody that gently builds over whispering synth work. The harp is notably absent, since Sinephro still saw herself primarily as a composer and producer. “It was a very exciting time, full of youthful, optimistic energy that ultimately produced an entire album of work that sounded like Space 4,” Sinephro says. “But in April 2018, I lost the hard drive with the compositions on it. I was distraught.” Space is the place … Sinephro performing at the Horniman Museum. Photograph: Fabrice Bourgelle It was a horrifying setback that proved instrumental in shaping the record that was to come. By the time she had gathered enough energy to try again, she reframed her priorities. “I asked myself, what is the one thing I regret not doing? And it was playing the harp,” she says. A quick Google saw a hired harp delivered to her bedroom two days later. Holding several recording sessions from August to November 2018, Sinephro approached the dates as purely collaborative, improvisational experiences, channeling the feelings and conversations she would have with the other musicians into eight intuitive compositions that became the “spaces” of the record’s title. The result is an impressionistic album whose every track evokes an imaginative response in the listener; from the warm meditative glow of Space 1, filled with a soundworld of plucked strings and birdsong, to the pulsating modular synths and rhythmic force of Space 3 – cut from a three-hour jam session – to the ambient, devotional tex