Sometimes Sinephro plays with broad strokes, throwing out bright glissandi like fairy dust. Sometimes she works her harp to sound like steel drums—an echo, perhaps, of her Caribbean heritage. Sometimes, she overdubs synths on synths on synths, and sometimes she's not there at all: On “Space 2,” she's only audible three-quarters of the way through the song, when the other instruments fall away to reveal her gently glowing pulsing chords and they change color, blur and dopplering, in a 90 second slide they slide into silence. In moments like these, she feels less like a player sitting at her instrument than a source of light.
Characterized by a lingering calm, the album is quiet until it isn't. “Space 6,” another trio track with Mollison on sax and Long on drums, opens with flickering hi-hats and pit-tight, snare and sax trading sharp responses until the whole thing seems to slip out of its axis. Sinephro's synths thicken, then shift in tone and timbre: grinding, almost jagged. The electronic suggestion of a heavy metal slide runs through the stereo field. For the first time on the record, the music gets heavy. swirling in the turmoil are hints of sadness, confusion, anger. It's a brief outburst, one whose edge is tempered by the closing “Space 8,” an 18-minute meditation in which Ahnansé's tender sax sits atop dozens of layers of processed harp, synth, and guitar. But the power of the 'Space 6' impact remains.
Sinephro wrote and recorded Space 1.8 in 2018 and 2019, in the wake of her recovery from a serious illness, and has described the process of making the album as “medicinal”. You can detect a hint of this drug in the music, particularly when its cues and chords pool in a warm bath of light or focus their energy into a cutting beam. Where the music of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders can reach spiritual transcendence, leaving one's body and reaching a higher plane, Space 1.8 it feels more grounded, more internal. Even its more abstract pieces, like the long, amorphous closing track, aren't truly mundane in scope. “Space 8,” despite its long duration, is less about traveling long distances than finding solace in one's own bones, in one's being. This deliberate smallness, this inward focus, is the source of much of this underrated record's outsized power. For all its overdubbed layers, “Space 8,” like the album itself, is as simple and stable as breathing.
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