The line never closes; it learns another way to return.
Looking for a 21st-century jazz album that turns repetition into transformation? Begin with Endlessness, Nala Sinephro’s 2024 cycle of arpeggio, improvisation, strings and electronic pulse.
⭐ NALA SINEPHRO: ENDLESSNESS — WARP RECORDS / WARP358 (2024)
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The body of the recording
The pulse steadies the breath, then refuses to let the body sleep.
Programmed arpeggios hold a luminous grid while drums, saxophones, brass and strings push against it; calm becomes vigilance, then motion.
Endlessness is not music about eternity. It is music about recurrence without obedience. Across ten pieces called “Continuum,” one arpeggio persists for forty-five minutes, yet almost nothing submits to it. The electronic figure measures time; the musicians keep discovering other ways to inhabit it. Nala Sinephro gives us a fixed line and then demonstrates that a line can remain fixed while everything around it changes its meaning.
That distinction matters. Repetition can be a shelter, but it can also be a sentence. A heartbeat reassures us because it returns; a clock frightens us for the same reason. The arpeggio in Endlessness moves between those two experiences. At first it promises orientation. Soon it begins to expose our desire to know what comes next. The notes return, but the body no longer receives them in the same way. This is not the circle as a symbol of peace. It is the circle as a place where difference has nowhere to hide.
The contradiction appears immediately. In “Continuum 1,” the programmed pulse advances with mechanical certainty while Morgan Simpson’s drums stretch, accelerate and fracture the measure. James Mollison’s saxophone does not resolve the argument. It gives instability a voice. The album could have used repetition as hypnosis; Sinephro uses it as resistance. In “Continuum 2,” harp, modular synthesizers, Lyle Barton’s piano, Sheila Maurice-Grey’s flugelhorn, Nubya Garcia’s saxophone and Natcyet Wakili’s drums gather around the same figure without agreeing on a single center. The arpeggio is less a metronome than a gravitational field. Everyone falls through it differently.
Sinephro controls an unusual number of the conditions in which that fall occurs. She produced and mixed the album, plays synthesizers, modular systems, pedal harp and piano, and recorded much of it with Rick David at Pink Bird Recording Co. and in her home. The scale then expands: Orchestrate’s twenty-one string players enter music composed and arranged by Sinephro, with Rob Ames responsible for its orchestration and conducting. Yet the orchestra never becomes a certificate of importance. The strings do not varnish the electronics or turn improvisation into respectable chamber music. They bend, cloud and occasionally widen the pulse until the room seems larger than the rhythm that built it.
The middle of the cycle appears to offer rest. “Continuum 4,” built from Sinephro’s synthesizer and piano with an additional bass sample by Alice Sinephro, contracts the ensemble into something almost private. “Continuum 5” lets Nubya Garcia’s saxophone move through a thinner electronic space. But serenity never becomes furniture. The absence of impact creates another kind of pressure: we begin to hear how insistently the underlying figure has occupied the ear. Silence is not the opposite of the pulse here. It is the outline the pulse leaves on the nervous system.
Later the body of the record becomes more explicit. In “Continuum 8,” Maurice-Grey’s trumpet, Barton’s synthesizer lead, Dwayne Kilvington’s synth bass and Wakili’s drums turn poise into alertness. The music does not explode; it tightens. By “Continuum 10,” piano, synthesizers, bass and drums have converted return into propulsion. This is the strange drama of an album without conventional narrative: nothing has to escape the cycle for an event to occur. A change in attack, density or weight is enough to make the familiar line sound newly dangerous, newly tender, or suddenly mortal.
The arpeggio therefore acts on breathing before it acts on interpretation. It steadies the listener, then makes that steadiness suspect. We anticipate the next group of notes and feel a small satisfaction when it arrives; at the same time, drums and horns keep displacing the point at which the body wants to rest. Calm becomes vigilance without announcing the transition. Sinephro offers consolation, but refuses anesthesia. The record does not carry us out of time. It makes us feel the work required to remain inside it.
Daniela Yohannes’s cover painting understands this condition. A dark, star-marked figure floats inside a pale field while black lines loop, cross and almost knot around it. A pink orbit offers the nearest thing to enclosure, but it does not close. The drawing cannot decide whether it is notation, trajectory, nervous impulse or trap. Maziyar Pahlevan’s design leaves the title and the artist’s name in opposite corners, as if language had been expelled from the event at the center. What remains there is not an emblem of infinity. It is a body learning how to float without being released.
That body is the coordinate Endlessness adds to Onirikón. The album alters time without slowing it into fog. Its beauty contains a fissure; its order produces uncertainty; its repetition changes rather than reassures. The cycle is not a return to origin, because neither musicians nor listener arrive with the same weight. Endlessness does not abolish the end. It makes every ending bend until it becomes another form of desire.
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