Album Review: Cascade by Floating Points

A set of bangers rich in colour and content, full to bursting with incident and energy, Sam Shepherd has made something rather special With the release of Cascade, Sam Shepherd is looking to complete some unfinished business. His last solo album as Floating Points, the 2019 epic Crush, was robbed by lockdown of its evident potential to carve up a dancefloor. Frustrated at its lack of live exposure, Shepherd resolved to make a follow-up capable of transporting both him and his audience into a seething mass of euphoria.

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It's a question only a select few artists ever have non-delusional reasons to wrestle with. Sam Shepherd (aka the producer, multi-instrumentalist and composer trading as Floating Points) has had valid grounds for pondering this dilemma recently. Promises, Shepherd's deservedly lauded 2021 collaboration with the late master of spiritual jazz, saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, amplified the ethos of blissful ambient drifts, jazz-influenced explorations and cyclical meditativeness of 2015's debut LP Elaenia to create a minimalist masterpiece of seriously beautiful, hushed contemplation, painted on the widest possible canvas with help from the London Symphony Orchestra.

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In 2014, Sam Shepherd wrote a career-defining tune in a matter of minutes. “Nuits Sonores” was finished on a flight to the Lyon festival of the same name, and it sounds as effortless as it apparently was, climbing towards the heavens without boiling over into excess. This is one of Shepherd’s two main modes—when he’s not a jazz auteur, he’s a crack house and techno producer.

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Floating Points' Sam Shepherd earned an enormous amount of attention and praise for Promises, his revelatory collaboration with Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra. The album's patient, slowly billowing soundscapes were far removed from his previous full-length, Crush, an often-playful set of experimental techno tracks and ambient pieces. He had wanted to explore the album's danceable side during live performances, but the COVID-19 pandemic curtailed those plans.

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After years composing in the jazz cosmos, Sam Shepherd takes a left turn with a bumper pack of unapologetic club bangers. Share When the glasses come off, you know Sam Shepherd is getting serious. An hour and a half into his recent Boiler Room set in New York, with a rapt crowd behind him, the producer whipped off his signature round specs. Then, you can tell he's sinking deep into the zone. As he masterfully turned up the heat during his marathon five-hour set, he broke into a huge grin. It might not be the image of Shepherd you know best—that of a gearhead polymath who's got a PhD in neuroscience and composes with jazz legends—but instead, the DJ who wants people to dance until they sweat, and then keep going. .

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