Most people would not bring a harp to a rave. But UK producer Floating Points – Sam Shepherd – is emphatically not most people: an uncommon artist as au fait with acoustic instruments and spiritual jazz as he is DJing to a delirious club.
There are a great many people who can push faders while bobbing about, headphones half on, half off. But few have Shepherd’s range. On his spatial, guitar band-adjacent album Reflections: Mojave Desert (2017), he used mountains as reverb, blasting his music into the California hills and then recording what came back. His celebrated 2021 record Promises looped the London Symphony Orchestra in with jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders. It was Sanders’s last recording before he died in 2022.
On the first of a three-night London residency, Shepherd delivers great swathes of his most recent, dancefloor-moving album, last year’s Cascade, with the aid of the set’s harpist, Miriam Adefris, and a live visual artist whose works provide a swirling counterpoint for Floating Points’ organic, evolving electronic sounds. The harp sits proudly centre stage, flanked by two complicated rigs – one for Shepherd, full of modular synths and drum machines, and one for Akiko Nakayama, whose “alive paintings” are created in situ and beamed, with the aid of a worried-looking visual mix assistant, on to screens at the back of the stage.
This rave of sorts – to be clear, it’s a 9pm live gig on a Wednesday in central London, not a DJ set in the wee hours in a warehouse in the back of beyond – starts beatifically. Long, pensive passages of solo harp ripple out. Eventually they are sampled and looped. Either that or Adefris has 37 fingers.
If the themes sound faintly familiar, that is because (I find out later) Adefris is playing heavily rescored elements from Floating Points’ previous works – Birth, from 2019’s Crush album – and a segment of Shepherd’s more recent score for the San Francisco Ballet’s production of Mere Mortals.
A full quarter of an hour in, Shepherd begins to answer Adefris’s arpeggios with synthetic ones of his own. A flute-like melody gradually comes to the fore. This elegiac, ambient music is both beautiful and a teasing gauntlet thrown down to those who came to dance.
Soon, Nakayama’s art explodes on to the screens: black and white galaxies of shimmers that begin to move, becoming whorls that recall luminescent plankton – floating points, if you will. Nakayama has a tube into which she blows, moving the liquid around. Eventually, more screens to the side of the stage reveal her hands, making the art.
When Shepherd’s beats do come, they come in hard. Birth4000, the taster track for Cascade, is one of the most straightforward bangers Shepherd has unleashed in recent times, a retro-futurist club track that nods lovingly to the Giorgio Moroder production for Donna Summer’s seminal 1977 single, I Feel Love. The art explodes into colour and the audience revs joyously into motion in the shadow of what looks like a blood cappuccino.
What follows is an unclassifiable set, with pumping 4/4 beats accompanied by the gloriously unstable oscillations of Shepherd’s synths. The music is often dialled right back down to droplet-like washes of sound or burbly groans; once or twice it all goes back to just the harp. Shepherd’s signature sound is full of its own arpeggios, often overlaid with a kind of Doppler effect. Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada are two forefathers of this sort of build-your-own-rig, club-confusing sounds. But – bar fellow travellers such as Four Tet and James Holden – Shepherd really doesn’t sound like anyone else. After a childhood grounding in classical music he gained a PhD in neuroscience while DJing regularly. His 2015 debut, Elaenia, was an electro-acoustic masterclass, bringing his musicianly chops to bear on electronic music. His PhD thesis was on pain – ironic, given this artist’s commitment to beauty.
The rest of the time tonight, Shepherd improvises around, and remixes, the dancefloor-facing parts of Cascade, swapping between motifs a crowd can cling to and more abstracted sounds that swerve tricksily in and out of phase. You can easily spot Key103, a tribute to a Manchester radio station from Shepherd’s youth, for its trancey intro and minimal techno wiggles.
Also met by an instant roar is Vocoder, a frisky, minimal track made almost entirely of rhythm. It peaks with one of Floating Points’ very rare uses of a vocal sample, making you want to punch the air. Nakayama responds with shimmering puddles of petrol, a paintbrush pumping black paint into white. A camera captures the crowd; the artist covers the dancing shapes in furry lichen.
The Floating Points gig-to-end-all-gigs may have been 2023’s one-night-only live performance of Promises at LA’s Hollywood Bowl, with UK wind instrument maestro Shabaka Hutchings standing in for Sanders alongside a wealth of other musicians from the classical, jazz and electronic worlds: a memorial to Sanders. Tonight’s multidisciplinary outing is a very different gig. But you can’t help but feel this body-jacking, retina-melting triumph would rank not too far behind.
