The Sleeves (Jack Cooper & Tara Cunningham) + Minami Saeki

The Sleeves are the duo of Jack Cooper and Tara Cunningham, both likely known to you as one half of Modern Nature. Following an all-instrumental Mossy Tapes release last November, Cooper and Cunningham have recorded 10 new songs showcasing their vocal and guitar interplay with only the faintest echoes of prior efforts (individually or collectively), representing a fully realized leap forward from their largely improvised debut. 'The Sleeves' is a somewhat counter intuitive take on the guitar/vocal duo formula (provided you think there is such a thing) though it's not nearly as simplistic as "the space between the notes" -- it would be the height of exaggeration to say an album this simultaneously expansive and incandescent is unprecedented. But it doesn't happen nearly often enough, either. The Sleeves have London and NYC dates planned for this July and September respectively, with further touring to be announced in the coming weeks “What I initially found so familiar and exciting about playing guitar with Jack - and continually do - is that our approach to music is pretty much exactly the same. And that is - to celebrate the space that frames ideas, embraces silence, to play simply, simultaneously championing our respective unembellished guitar sounds, whilst looking for sounds that aren’t like a guitar at all - bells, birds, switching between radio stations etc. It’s rare to find someone who - whatever this means to you - ‘gets it’ - and I think when we started playing guitar together, we both knew the other had something of whatever our ‘it’ was.” “‘The Sleeves’ is the sum of our shared musical journey thus far, an exciting mix of familiarity and uncharted territory in its approach to structure and how we use our guitars and voices. It feels to me like we are both citing shared references and traditions, whilst floating in our own, single-cell world that is completely genre-less. That grey area is where we seem to thrive. As Jack says, it feels like music that really couldn’t be made by anyone else.” - Tara Cunningham Minami Saeki: Minami Saeki film actress, singer, and dancerborn in Nagasaki on the 18 February 1990she studied classical ballet, contemporary dance, classical singing, etc.she has acted in films, e.g., “Village on the Village” (Yukihiro Kurokawa) or “Natsu no Musumetachi-Himegoto” (Teiichi Hori) among others.she is active as a singer and has performed with Taku Sugimoto, Junichiro Tanaka, Wakana Ikeda, Masafumi Ezaki, Takashi Masubuchi, Manfred Werder, Stefan Thut among others in the fields of both pop and experimental music.the CD “Songs” is a collaborative work with Taku Sugimoto.