- After years composing in the jazz cosmos, Sam Shepherd takes a left turn with a bumper pack of unapologetic club bangers.
- 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.
The dance floor's unbridled joy is the essence of Cascade, Shepherd's latest LP as Floating Points. Since he released his early boogie-house singles in 2009, which were made firmly with DJs in mind, Shepherd has drifted into increasingly ambient territory across his career. First, with the jazzy, expansive soundscapes of his debut album Elaenia, and later with his collaboration with Pharaoh Sanders, Promises. At times, it seemed he might leave the club behind altogether.
But he never quite made the jump. In between those LPs there was 2019's Crush, which contained some of Shepherd's meanest club productions to date. He'd been planning to road test them across the world's dance floors but the pandemic had other ideas. Cascade seeks to remedy this by placing Shepherd in the rave once more. It's an album of unapologetic bangers, boasting some of the most enjoyable music Shepherd's ever released. But it also sacrifices some of what makes his best work so singular.
Cascade's tracks were composed while Shepherd was scoring a ballet in California, meaning he had to forsake his studio full of arcane analogue gear for a simple laptop and headphones. These limitations result in some of the most straightforward club tracks he's ever made. Their DJ-friendly runtimes regularly top seven minutes, allowing Shepherd to settle deep into his grooves and pace the elements out gradually. "Vocoder (Club Mix)," opens the album with stadium-ready garage, which keeps fresh with sections that spotlight rumbling sub-bass or anxiously whirring machinery. "Fast Forward" is similarly powerful, where Shepherd piles coruscating melodies atop a megaton kick and drums played by Shepherd's friend Dan Snaith (better known as Caribou).
For close followers of Shepherd's music, much of Cascade's sonic palette will be familiar. "Del Oro" is a loose-limbed, jazzy house song which could have been an offcut from his memorable 2011 EP Shadows, while the fluttering harp melodies and itchy percussion of "Ocotillo" recall Crush's electro-acoustic beauty, as does the keening ambience of closer "Ablaze". There are rare moments here, however, where Shepherd truly experiments with fresh styles. "Birth4000" is the album's most thrilling offering, a campy disco thumper whose beetling bassline gives an unsubtle nod to Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder's "I Feel Love." Meanwhile, "Afflecks Palace" answers a question nobody ever thought to ask: what would it sound like if Floating Points made some gnarly dungeon acid? The result is unhinged in the best way, ending with a psychedelic freakout where Shepherd's machines are pushed to the brink.
This unstable quality is something that unites all of Shepherd's music, no matter what genre he takes on. His instrumentation always feels curiously alive, even when composed entirely on digital instruments. On "Tilt Shift," drums rustle, twist and chitter, never settling into a predictable loop, while elsewhere, his synth melodies distort for maximum tension. Even in Shepherd's simplest moments, there's always the thrilling potential for the unpredictable. Despite this, Shepherd's music still has a tendency to feel overly polite, and this sometimes gets in the way on Cascade. The big, dramatic drops—some of the most obvious he's ever written—lack real bite and grit, too manicured to channel the energy of truly losing it in the dance.
When he was exploring cosmic ambient realms, there were a fair number of Floating Points fans yearning for the old days when he made music for dancing. Now, they've got their wish, and Cascade is an undeniably fun ride. As a producer, Shepherd's work stands out for its mastery of space and texture, its sublime delicacy and beauty. This refinement is inevitably lost when Shepherd goes for the club jugular, but then again, this bumper pack of pumping rhythms doesn't give you much time to miss what's not there. Shepherd certainly isn't—he's already on to new projects, building his own sound system for an upcoming tour and working on soundtracks to films and anime. But before all that, there will be the long-awaited tour where, with these club weapons locked and loaded, the glasses are guaranteed to fly off.
トラックリスト01. Vocoder (Club Mix)
02. Key103
03. Birth4000
04. Del Oro
05. Fast Forward0
06. Ocotillo
07. Afflecks Palace
08. Tilt Shift
09. Ablaze