“It’s impossible to take in/It’s impossible to see”
THE UNCUT GUIDE TO THIS MONTH’S KEY RELEASES
MODERN NATURE
No Fixed Point In Space
BELLA UNION
THE filmmaker Derek Jarman, a veritable English visionary, wrote his book Modern Nature about his experience living alone in a cottage in Dungeness, on the English south coast. Jarman decamped to this terminal beach knowing he was dying, but in the process created a late body of work – films, writings and artworks – in which he exploited his closeness to the Earth, and the focus gained when living in a remote place, away from metropolitan London.
He was not the first English artist to seek renewal and resuscitation in a rural setting. Jack Cooper of Modern Nature, the band named after Jarman’s book, has also recently moved from London to a village in East Anglia. Not far from what’s known as ‘Constable country’, he chose to settle in a timeless patch of Deep England, in a settlement formed from a classic, jarring English knot of knurled, halftimbered houses ringed by geometric housing estates.
is the group’s fourth album since 2019, if you include minialbum . Frequently stated, and with good reason, is their similarity with the strange, sprawling music of late Talk Talk – not only in their songs’ fluid structures, open acoustics and sense of wonder. On previous releases they have also occasionally paid convincing homage to Can/Neu!-like repetitive
