Following 2021/22’s music and art project Island of Noise, another release of lovely simmering stillness by Jack Cooper and his Cambridge-based band, one that with delicate instrumentation captures nature’s processes “like the sound of roots, branches, mycelium, the intricacies of a dawn chorus, neurons firing, and the unknown”. There’s a constant sense of gentle, subtle movement, of process and chance, from opener Tonic to the gorgeous former Songs of the Day Murmuration and Cascade, and then into Orange, in which voices sweetly merge in the refrain “turning again we go round and recover”. With the album’s title inspired by an Einstein phrase, the goal here is to loosen the usual musical parameters, to unshackle from the usual constrictions of time signature and other musical syntax, certainly done with woodwind, percussion, guitar, strings and Cooper’s voice, which has a soft fragility reminiscent of Robert Wyatt. Only seven tracks in all, but all seem to have a star-gazing calm and expansiveness outside of time. Midway there’s the glistening number Sun, to Tapestry, and finally closer Ensõ, featuring the rich, lead voice of Julie Tippetts. Soak yourself slowly then into what is literally, and metaphorically a slow, sensuous, beautiful release. Out on Bella Union.
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