We're delighted to welcome The Sleeves to Real Magic Books for the latest in our always special in stores to celebrate the start of the summer holidays.

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 realised 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.

“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

“Tara and I started playing guitar together at the start of 2024. It was an improvised music night in a railway arch in South London. The set was great but there was a couple of minutes in particular where Tara and I really sort of locked in. We made a record a few weeks later. There was something in the way we played together that felt very intuitive from the start. We recognised a shared approach right away and an affinity to the way each other played.”

“During the summer we got stuck in a traffic jam coming home from a show in Glasgow. We spent a few hours singing along to the Mamas & The Papas and Simon & Garfunkel and over the course of the day, like magic we became The Sleeves."

“We're excited about it because it feels like music that really couldn’t be made by anyone else. We don’t bring different elements to it. We both bring exactly the same things. It’s the result of our similarities.” - Jack Cooper

We'll be hanging out at the shop all day before an evening of summer fun. Bar will be open and watch this space for more news about the evening. See you there.