Subdued Sounds

MODERN NATURE Modern Nature, led by Essex-based Jack Cooper, is a group that blurs the lines between folk music, modern composition and improvisation. Over the past 5 years Cooper and collaborators have taken a palette of elementary sounds and themes, honed them, and launched into an expansive world of openness and vivid technicolour. It's a music that hasnt been heard before; as melodic as anything Cooper has produced but framed by rhythms and instrumentation that reflect the chaos, unpredictability and colour of the natural world. Certain moorings - hushed percussion, strings and Cooper's lambent voice - are present throughout, but latest album, No Fixed Point In Space, marks a shift to utilising musical notation as a point of departure, from which the group explore the space around suggested notes and rhythms to create a semi-improvised, semi-composed ensemble performance. These explorations of partly organised chance were recorded live and directly to tape. This approach gives the music a remarkably fresh feel; songs pulse and evolve. The changes between movements, verse and choruses are almost all ambiguous.

CINDY Cindy is a key part of the San Francisco/Bay Area dream pop, fog pop, lo fi scene. Started almost within minutes of songwriter Karina Gill first picking up a supremely beaten-up electric guitar, the serendipitously assembled crew pick up up on minimal chords and murmured melodies to create hazy and nostalgic pop-craft with lyrical backbone. Heightened narrative drama comes from unexpectedly unsettling phrasing and expectant, elementary drone. Featuring folks from Children Maybe Later, Now, and Flowertown, the group draw on the sparse sounds of the Velvet Underground, Young Marble Giants, and Galaxie 500 to soft but startling effect.