Modern Nature leader Jack Cooper says with the group’s fourth album he “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.” No Fixed Point in Space succeeds in that regard, laying out a bucolic, earthy music that inspired by free and modern composers along with the natural world, and features contributions from Anton Lukoszevieze, Mira Benjamin and Heather Roche of Apartment House, Alex Ward (This Is Not This Heat/Spiritualized), Dominic Lash, Chris Abrahams (The Necks), Julie Tippetts, along with regular collaborators Jeff Tobias (Sunwatchers) and Jim Wallis. It’s a gorgeous, thoughtful record and you can listen to it below.
We asked Jack (previously of Ultimate Painting and Mazes) to tell us a little more about No Fixed Point in Space, and he gave us a list of inspirations, including Miles Davis, John Cage, Julie Tippetts, and his hometown football team, Manchester United. Read his list and commentary below.
MODERN NATURE’S JACK COOPER – 5 INFLUENCES BEHIND ‘NO FIXED POINT IN SPACE’
Julie Tippetts / Julie Driscoll
I don’t remember not owning the Julie Driscoll and Brian Auger Trinity Greatest Hits. Julie’s performance on their version of Let The Sunshine In is like a shot of vitamin D; a masterclass of technique and verve. It would be in my Desert Island Discs for her singing alone. At some point I found out about Julie’s second act as Julie Tippetts and followed her down a path of collaborations with the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, her partner Keith Tippett and her early seventies masterpiece Sunset Glow. When I began writing the songs for this album, I kept thinking of Julie and daydreamed about asking her to sing on the record. I eventually got in touch with her via a mutual friend and after many hours chatting, she agreed to sing on the album. We’ve become good friends and singing with her was as inspiring as hearing her voice for the first time. A really great person.
John Cage & Morton Feldman In Conversation
During the Cambridge leg of our last tour in 2022, I became aware that something had gone wrong with my vision. By the end of the gig, I was fairly confident that my retina had detached in my left eye and I needed to go to A&E. A few days later I had an operation on my eye to reattach the retina and I was sent home to recuperate. To cut a long story short, I had to lie down for nearly a month and due to an existing astigmatism in my uninjured eye, I could barely see. Through a cloud of belladonna I spent most of the month lying in silence, listening to my wife and daughter laughing or playing a 4 hour conversation between John Cage and Morton Feldman that was originally aired on WBAI in the mid-sixties. I fell asleep to it countless times… woke up an hour later and they were still talking. At some point, I started mapping out this record in my head, imagining the sounds and space but this recording of Cage and Feldman runs through it.
Sarah Hennies
Thanks to a chance mention of my previous band Ultimate Painting on twitter, the composer Sarah Hennies and I have become good friends over the last couple of years and she’s been a mentor to me since I’ve been writing music like the Arrival album that came out this year. Her music is wide eyed and a song on our record is directly inspired by a piece of hers called “Spectral Malsconcities.” The opening movement is one of my favourites.
The Miles Davis Lost Quintet
One of the reference points for this record is Miles Davis’ Lost Quintet… the group that he put together for live dates around the time he was making Bitches Brew. They sadly never made a studio album but the live recordings and YouTube footage more than makes up for that. The group (Jack DeJohnette, Dave Holland, Wayne Shorter and Chick Corea) shares an expansiveness with the studio recordings but often play with great economy and awareness of space. I wanted to make an album where the instruments ignored their traditional place in the tapestry, where all the musicians were responsible for the pulse, the melody and the tone of the music. I didn’t want the drums playing a beat… that momentum is the responsibility of the guitar as much as the drums. A blueprint for that sort of approach is here. That democracy is much more apparent in free music and Miles’ band definitely touches on that mindset.
Football
I’ve been a Manchester United fan since the late 1980s and although they’ve floundered over the last decade, it’s still something I look forward to every few days. It’s difficult to see through the money that pollutes the game but watching is always a buzz. Football differs from music or art if you agree that there’s one objective; to win. But I think anyone who loves it acknowledges that it isn’t as simple as that and everything in between is not too dissimilar. I love it though… some of the most exciting moments.
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No Fixed Point in Space is out now via Bella Union.
