Review: Floating Points + Pharoah Sanders + London Symphony Orchestra - Promises

Sam Shepherd aka Floating Points is an artist I knew little about until 2019. Through various assembled playlists on Spotify (recommending similar artists to me) and trawling the usual sites for new Electronic releases, I happened upon Crush, Shepherd's sophomore effort. This followed the success of 2015's Elaenia which was one of Resident Advisor's Album of the Year picks. Plus, he's on Ninja Tune; a label synonymous with good output from interesting and fresh talent in the Electronic music genre. Therefore Floating Points warranted some attention.

To do this review justice I listened back to Crush and Elaenia (the latter for the first time), and was blown away by the creativity, diversity and timelessness across these two LPs alone.

With Elaenia there is much to experience. From the beatless, ethereal, sweeping sounds of Nespole to the Jazz-influenced shuffling drums, rumbling bass guitars, strings, keys and organically shifting rhythms that carry along Silhouettes (I, II & III), to the slight and carefully evolving warmth of the (dream inspired) ambient title track. The wonderfully interwoven samples, synth rhythms and key strokes of Argenté - which immediately reminded me of Nils Frahm at his best - give way to Thin Air which could easily be the second act of the same track, as it bobs and bounces along and gradually swells and then dissipates to a few pops and shuffles to close. For Marmish evokes a mood of a come-down in a funky club with its gentle quality, underpinned by the organ, subtle jazz drumming and cymbal taps. Peroration Six caps it all off wonderfully with steadily building drums and strings. It is a track that is ready to bite - and bite hard - and then at the height of the crescendo it very abruptly (and appropriately) slams the proverbial door shut.

The whole of Elaenia is a cohesive and deeply engaging 43-minute journey which is well worth investing your time in (Spotify link in album cover below). It is the sort off stuff that you can truly immerse yourself in and return to with equal parts satisfaction and a feeling of new discovery each listen.

Then we move to Crush. The beautifully crafted opener Falaise uses swirling strings and woodwind to build slowly and (much like the end of the last album) finish abruptly. We then are treated to the bouncy, glitchy breakbeats of Last Bloom, where Shepherd is clearly taking some queues from Aphex Twin to great effect. Other standout tracks for me are LesAlpx in which shadows of Jon Hopkins and FourTet are evident, and the drum and bass rhythms of Bias which are just majestic. Overall it is a much harder (and 'harder') listen than Elaenia but showcases Shepherd's will to evolve his ideas and sounds.

This brings us to Promises. 46 minutes of some of the most beautiful jazz and orchestral infused electronic music I have ever heard. Weirdly enough, after writing so much about Shepherd so far I am having to really think about how to quantify this LP to the point where I feel I have done it justice. Firstly, I admit I knew absolutely nothing about Pharoah Sanders other than he'd played saxophone for the late great John Coltrane. That's enough of an entry point to his CV to know the man has calibre and experience, and you can hear and feel from the first note he plays that Shepherd has managed to channel all of Sanders' emotion through the sax into this piece. I am guessing they're very close friends now and that it was equally a privilege to both work together with the LSO on this project.

Musically, this LP just glides and soars with a subtlety and grace that my increasingly appreciating ears can only attribute to Jazz; with this as the foundation of Promises, the work is split into 9 movements that seamlessly knit together.

On the first listen I think I realised about 20 minutes in I had been not only totally captivated to the exclusion of all else (hard to do in the modern world) but I was also sitting, mouth agape at the beauty of it all. I will freely admit I was close to tears by the end of it. Music does that to you sometimes, right? On my third or fourth listen - which was with my good friend Luke - I think I stuck it on and we listened to it whilst chatting, but both ended up being reduced to focusing on the piece in silent reverence for what we were experiencing.

The gentle evolutions from movement to movement are so slight that it requires a keen ear to pick up some of the neat shifts in tone, or small entrance/exit pieces from certain instruments in the orchestra. At one point in Movement 3, you hear some gentle xylophone notes that literally made me shiver. Movement 4 gives way to some vocal chatter; not words as such, just using voice as another instrument. Pharoah Sanders' sax playing wonderfully punches in and out of the gentle sway of the orchestra and Shepherd's playing. It's like liquid, as it glides over the movements. You can feel this was done in a single take, even if it wasn't. The guy pushes his soul out through the notes.

The glorious soaring string section in Movement 6 is the stuff of dreams; the kind of music that is written for any player in an orchestra which they must crave the opportunity to play, even when you reach the heady heights of the London Symphony Orchestra. Movement 7 brings Sanders' back in for some more sax, and I love the way he's so closely mic'd up that you can actually hear his breath and spittle pushing through the reed as it reverberates and sends out its caramel tones.

Please, please PLEASE go and listen to this. Take time for yourself to immerse, enjoy and tell anyone who cares about music the way I do to do the same.

It is phenomenal, and in the last year I haven't been able to quite find anything that has affected me quite as deeply as this album. It's euphoric, thought-provoking, calming, positive and makes you think and feel all the things the world can be (and will be) when we - and it - are at our best.

Shepherd has done it....we can too.

10/10

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