Floating Points – Cascade
Manchester producer Sam Shepherd’s inventive techno proclivities were interrupted after Crush, his critically acclaimed 2019 album as Floating Points. First came COVID lockdowns, followed by new applications and iterations of the Floating Points brand including film scoring, ballet composition, producing others’ albums, and chamber collaborations. These were all largely successful diversions, but to him diversions nevertheless. Having never really had the chance to play out the Crush music on club and festival stages as he’d intended, he might call the work collected on new album Cascade a return to form.
Cascade surrounds recently released Floating Points singles with four brand new songs. It kicks off with 2022’s instant classic “Vocoder,” as voices run through the titular tech ping and bounce over brushed drums and keyboards tuned like beaten pipes. It closes with a two-song suite, “Tilt Shift” and “Ablaze,” that flirts with ambient yet grimy drum’n’bass before beeping its way to a long fade-out. These bookend an album that feels by degrees more traditional and straightforward than Crush, but only because it trades in that LP’s abstract arrangements and sample sets for speedy minimal techno that’s unafraid to expand like fire fed by air.
Songs like “Afflecks Palace” and “Del Oro” showcase Shepherd’s expertise in traveling to extremes of density and melody (or lack thereof). We hear single-note vocal samples flourish into patches that overlap and swarm like locusts, and ethereal chords fighting with keening acid keys and the Amen break. We also hear Floating Points paying twisted homage to his forebears throughout—The Art of Noise gone howling mad, for example, or bell tones hinting at Capricorn’s “20Hz.” Save for its airy ending diptych, everything on the album builds to some manner of full-on stomp and sonic fury.
Shepherd manages to simultaneously position the Floating Points sound at its most sinister and euphoric. Cascade spirals like a blown pinwheel, spinning and shimmering in literally dizzying fashion, sending listeners dancing, stumbling abruptly, and dancing again.
Label: Ninja Tune
Year: 2024
Similar Albums:
Floating Points: Cascade
Note: When you buy something through our affiliate links, Treble receives a commission. All albums we cover are chosen by our editors and contributors.
