Friday 15 December 2023, 7.30pm
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.
Michiko Ogawa is a performer-composer specialising in the clarinet, born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. She performs not only classical repertoire but also contemporary and experimental musics, including free improvisation and film soundtrack work. She is also working with Hammond organ and "sho"; Japanese bamboo organ.
She also has been collaborating with musicians Samuel Dunscombe, Taku Sugimoto, James Rushford, Carolyn Chen, Golden Fur, Manuel Lima, Lucy Railton, Jonny Chang and Klaus Lang. She also frequently collaborates with visual artists, such Angela Jennings, Lindsay Bloom, Brianna Rigg, Laurence Favre and Sabina Maselli. She is one of the core members of the collectively oriented Harmonic Space Orchestra in Berlin since 2019.
As a researcher, she has been researching about Teiji Ito, a Japanese-American performer and composer based in New York City since 2015, and received a DMA for his dissertation focusing on Teiji Ito's film music. She is currently working on his biography.
LUCY RAILTON is a cellist based in Berlin who works in composition, improvisation and electronic music, releasing her own work on Modern Love, Editions Mego - GRM Portraits, PAN (with Peter Zinovieff), Takuroku and SN Variations (with Kit Downes). She has recently performed with Rebecca Salvadori, Farida Amadou, Catherine Lamb, Kali Malone, Khyam Allami and Stephen O’Malley and Max Eilbacher. She is also involved in the presentation of works by Maryanne Amacher, Iannis Xenakis and Morton Feldman and music using Just Intonation; her engagement with this repertoire has occasioned extensive explorations of resonance, rational intonation and psychoacoustics, preoccupations that are ever present in her own work. Lucy established the Kammer Klang series at Cafe OTO, which ran for 10 years, and co-founded and co-directed the London Contemporary Music Festival from 2013-2016.
