• News

• All

Aug 17, 2023 By Mark Redfern Photography by James Sharp

Modern Nature (the band led by Jack Cooper) are releasing a new album, No Fixed Point In Space, on September 29 via Bella Union. New they have shared its second single, “Cascade,” via a music video composed of one mainly static frame. Watch it below.

Cooper had this to say about the new song in a press release: “‘Cascade’ is a link between the abstract colors of this record and the rhythms of the last one Island of Noise. The imagery is an attempt to convey how overwhelming the world can be when you make the time to really observe it. Beautiful, intricate and infinite. I was honored to be able to sing this round a microphone with the great Julie Tippetts… something I’ll never forget.”

Previously Modern Nature shared the album’s first single, the seven-minute “Murmuration,” via a music video. “Murmuration” was one of our Songs of the Week.

Of the new album, Cooper said in a previous press release: “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.

“The way you see or hear music in your head is abstract and magic… often more beautiful than what eventually appears on tape. When you sit down with an instrument and begin translating an idea, it quickly conforms. I’ve tried to develop this music without thinking in terms of set rhythms, time signatures, folk or pop structures, syntax; the devices you associate with the music world which I come from. I wanted to make music that was abstract, free and honest, whilst still being predominantly tonal and recognizably song based. It feels like time to make something that no one has heard before.”

The musicians and collaborators for this record include Anton Lukoszevieze, Mira Benjamin and Heather Roche of Apartment House, Alex Ward (This Is Not This Heat / Spiritualized), Dominic Lash, Chris Abrahams of The Necks, and Julie Tippetts (FKA Julie Driscoll), as well as long-term collaborators Jeff Tobias (Sunwatchers) and Jim Wallis.

Read our interview with Cooper, where he discusses his previous album, Island of Noise.

Support Under the Radar on Patreon.