ON MINIMALISM (SPACE 1.8)

The concept of minimalism comes from architecture and it consists of stripping everything down to its essential quality and achieving simplicity. The idea is not entirely without ornamentation, but all parts, details, and joinery are considered as reduced to a stage where no one can remove anything further to improve the design.

Minimalist architects not only consider the physical qualities of the building. They believe in the spiritual dimension and the invisible, by listening to the figure and paying attention to details, people, space, nature, and materials, believing this reveals the abstract quality of something that is invisible and aids the search for the essence of those invisible qualities, such as natural light, sky, earth, and air.

In turn, this belief is rooted in Zen oriental philosophy that attains concepts of simplicity to transmit the ideas of freedom and the essence of living. Simplicity is not only aesthetic value, it has a moral perception that looks into the nature of truth and reveals the inner qualities and essence of materials and objects.

However, as with everything in arts, minimalism as aesthetics is just one part of the puzzle if we consider ethics and politics. Likewise many positive schools of thought, and many other techniques for grasping the "essence" of things and the present moment through contemplation and meditation, all of these techniques, if disconnected from a major social orientation, tend to be loose lines of action and ephemeral exercises.

"Less is better" is too simple and a general idea to have any real content or to serve as a vital guide. There are a thousand exceptions that make it lose value.

There is a systole and diastole of creation. First the exuberance and the explosion of actions and possibilities, then the filter and the selection. Why start with the selection and the distillation, if you have not generated and tested enough ideas or if you do not have enough direct and personal experience? Minimalism may be at the end of the road, not the beginning. And that is the tricky part. It is necessary to gain experience and to fail many times to revindicate minimalism.

I'm not saying that smallness, meditation, and focusing need to be avoided. What I mean is that existential minimalism could be too individualistic (it is to put yourself and your mechanisms) when it lacks a great social, political or moral project into which to insert itself. There is harm when it puts the focus only on happiness and personal satisfaction. Where is a greater purpose than the individual, the meaning of life or morality that recognizes and includes the projects of other people and beings?

Most minimalists emphasize the reduction of possessions, it seems that existential minimalism is a school of interior decoration where emptiness abounds. It is true that minimalism helps to organize the mental chaos, and that focusing on the essentials helps to figure out the landscape. But the tree is only a tree. Only by knowing the paths in the forest, by resembling the whole ecosystem, minimalism can be integrated as part of a deep philosophy.

On the other hand, minimalism as aesthetics could be a powerful tool. Art is a field of experimentation. Art is dependent on politics but at the same time is free of deontological and moral action. In this leeway of independence, where nobody knows the starting point and the ending line, let it be room for minimalism to defy our senses, or just to transport ourselves to the inner layers, to connect with us, and so with the rest of the world. That is the beauty (and function perhaps) of merging personal thought and universal action. To transcend, you need immanence. And to create immanence, there should be transcendence.

And this can be demonstrated by the tones of this album in which a few chords simulate tons of rhythms. A total meditative-disturbed-hysteric-imbalanced-relaxed-cinematic atmosphere in just a few sounds. In short, a mental medicine.

Space 1.8, Nala Sinephro's debut album.

"Sinephro wrote and recorded Space 1.8 in 2018 and 2019, in the wake of her recovery from a serious illness, and she has described the process of making the album as “medicinal.” You can detect a hint of that medicine in the music, particularly when her synths and strings pool into a warm bath of light, or focus their energy into a cutting beam. Where the music of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders can tap into spiritual transcendence, leaving one’s body and reaching a higher plane, Space 1.8 feels more grounded, more interior. Even its most abstract pieces, like the long, amorphous closing track, are not really cosmic in scope. “Space 8,” despite its considerable duration, is less about journeying great distances than finding solace in one’s own bones, one’s own being. That deliberate smallness, that inner focus, is the source of much of this understated record’s outsized power. For all its overdubbed layers, “Space 8,” like the album itself, feels as simple and as steadying as breathing"

(Pitchfork review).

Bonus track

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