Nala Sinephro learned to play the pedal harp in secret. She was 16 and studying jazz; in the evenings, when she was supposed to be practicing, she snuck turns on a stringed behemoth she discovered in one of her high school’s music rooms. Technically, it was off-limits, but Sinephro had a fascination with strings; she had grown up playing fiddle, learning folk songs by ear. The harp beckoned.
On Space 1.8, assisted by a rotating cast of musicians from the UK’s dynamic jazz scene, the Caribbean-Belgian musician still sometimes sounds like she is trying to evade prying ears. Whether jamming with her peers or multi-tracking solo compositions on pedal harp and modular synthesizer, she is a subtle presence, her tone liquid, mutable, mysterious—the cosmic background radiation to a galaxy of her own creation.