Long ago, Sam Shepherd was a neuro-epigenetics PhD student by day and a DJ by night who, like his friends Four Tet and Caribou, knew how to wax a dancefloor. As Floating Points, he released fluid, shapeshifting electro-acoustic music that played to the feet but never at the expense of the head or the heart. After two exceptional studio albums came Promises, his 2021 magnum opus with the London Symphony Orchestra, featuring the last major recordings of the late jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders. Since then, Shepherd has scored a rapturously received ballet. An anime for Cowboy Bebop animator Shinichirō Watanabe is in the works.
Cascade, Shepherd’s first wholly Floating Points album since Crush (2019), is, enthrallingly, made up almost entirely of dancefloor-adjacent bangers, each unique in their tinkering with genre, tempo and chosen instrumentation. The elliptical, nearly nine-minute Ocotillo features the harp of Austrian-Ethiopian musician Miriam Adefris and a clavichord that belonged to Shepherd’s great-aunt. He loves a modular synth, and giddy, Doppler-like oscillations fill the eight-minute-plus runtime of Fast Forward, reaching a kind of retro-futurist rave epiphany on Afflecks Palace. The absolutely slapping Birth4000, meanwhile, pays cheeky tribute to Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s I Feel Love; it’s just a crying shame the album doesn’t find room for the 7½ minute extended remix.
