* En anglais uniquement
Sunda Arc are brothers Nick Smart and Jordan Smart. Best known as key members of folk and jazz influenced minimalists Mammal Hands, Sunda Arc channels the duos love of electronic and dance music, without losing any of their deep musicality. Drawing on techno, electronica, neo-classical and post-rock influences, Sunda Arc compose and perform using both electronic and acoustic instruments, including analogue synthesisers, home-made software patches, piano, saxophones and bass clarinet – all finessed and channelled through their own unique creative strategies. Integrating electronic elements and experimentation with the expressiveness and energy of acoustic instruments and live performance, Sunda Arc’s music is expansive, compelling and fun in equal parts.
Their debut EP ‘Flicker’ was released in December 2018 and the band have performed at AB Brussels, Blue Dot Festival, The Roundhouse, Jazz Café, Reworks Festival, and the Royal Albert Hall, London and Albert Hall, Manchester with GoGo Penguin. Their debut LP, ‘Tides’ , was released on Gondwana Records on 7th February 2020.
‘Tides’, takes its name from the idea of unseen forces that can affect our lives in myriad ways, being pushed and pulled and at the whim of powerful forces outside of our control as well as offering a nod to things such as the tides on our planet, tectonic plate movements and weather systems. There are often chaotic elements in these systems that function in a way that produce a type of controlled randomness on a large scale. This is something they try to reflect in their music by adopting some of the ways these systems work into musical sequences, and using ideas such as chaos theory to control musical parameters.
Sunda Arc said “Tides is a reference to themes we were thinking a lot about during the making of this album. These include the similarities between macro and micro systems, or the circulatory and nervous systems in the body. Things that produce a type of controlled randomness on a large scale”.