No Fixed Point In Space, the third full-length album by Jack Cooper’s Modern Nature, takes the palette of sound and themes that were honed on 2021’s Island Of Noise and launches them into an expansive world of openness and vivid technicolour. It’s a music that hasn’t 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.

“With this record,” Cooper explains, “I wanted the music to reflect nature: beginnings and endings, arrivals and departures, process and chance. I wanted the music and the words to feel like roots, branches, mycelium, the intricacies of a dawn chorus, neurons firing, the unknown.”

Certain moorings – woodwind, percussion, strings and Cooper’s lambent voice – are still present and recognisable from No Fixed Point In Space’s predecessor, Island Of Noise, but the new record 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.