Floating Points, real name Sam Shepherd, has announced the release of his debut 7-track album “Elaenia“, scheduled for release in the UK via Pluto on 6th November 2015. He has also shared a new music video ‘Silhouettes‘, an eleven-minute overture that is also the second track on his forthcoming album. Below you can read the press release.
Shot on location in Rio Tinto – a corner of the Spanish and Portuguese border (deemed the closest thing to Mars on Earth) as well as in the studio in Barcelona over a period of six months – the clip was directed by Junior Martínez and Pablo Barquín.
“We’ve all been friends for a long time, and I was always hanging around their studio in Barcelona,” Shepherd says. “When he [Barquín] invented a light painting machine, the idea to do a music video came about very quickly. We wanted to juxtapose the light painting in an exotic environment and this lead us to Rio Tinto.”
For the past ten years, all roads Shepherd has followed have been slowly leading to Elaenia – an album with roots deep in his formative years, and one that draws upon everything Shepherd has done to date. Growing up in Manchester – where he started out as a chorister at an early age – Shepherd eventually arrived in London for university, where he spent the next five years engineering Elaenia, all the while deejaying in cities across the globe and working towards his PhD in neuroscience. An album that draws inspiration from classical, jazz, electronic music, soul and even Brazilian popular music,Elaenia – named after the bird of the same name – is the epitome of the forward-thinking Floating Points vision in 2015.
His debut album proper, Elaenia is the culmination of all things Sam Shepherd: the founder of Eglo Records, the ensemblist, the producer and scientist. He even built a harmonograph from scratch to create the artwork for Elaenia, the end result created by using it and 2 fibre optic cables of 0.5 and 1.5mm diameters, which were connected to light sources responding to bass drum and white noise percussive sounds from the album track ‘For Marmish’.
Musically, the mesmerising ebbs and flows of Elaenia span moments of light and dark; rigidity and freedom; elegance and chaos. The lush, euphoric enlightenment of ‘Silhouettes (I, II & III)’ – a three-part composition that acts as a testament to those early days Shepherd spent playing in various ensembles, complete with an immensely tight rhythm section that ends up providing a cathartic, blissful release. Elsewhere, Shepherd’s knack for masterful late night sets bare fruition to the hypnotic, electronic pulse of ‘Argenté’, which leads into final track ‘Peroration Six’ – a track with one of the biggest tension-and-release moments in music this year.
Like his contemporaries and good friends Caribou and Four Tet, Shepherd has nurtured the Floating Points name into one renowned for ambitious and forward-thinking DJ sets, having performed all over the world at events and clubs such as Output NYC, Trouw, Sonar, Unit in Tokyo, Panorama Barand, of course, Nuits Sonores (which lent its name to his seminal track from summer 2014), as well as the much missed Plastic People, where he held a residency for five years. Elaenia also features a huge variety of contributors, including drums from Tom Skinner and Leo Taylor plus vocals from Rahel Debebe-Dessalegne, Layla Rutherford and Shepherd himself. Elsewhere there’s Susumu Mukai taking up bass, Alex Reeve on guitar, Qian Wu andEdward Benton sporting violins, Matthew Kettle on the viola and Joe Zeitlinon the cello.
Ultimately, Elaenia provides context to the music that Shepherd has been making to date. Every DJ set he’s performed, every talent he has produced, every composition he has written are thought of as precursors to Elaenia – a dazzling score which puts Shepherd in the spotlight as a composer who has produced an album that bridges the gap between his rapturous dance music and formative classical roots.
Floating Points will debut the live version ‘Silhouettes (I, II & III)’ at Dimensions Festival in Croatia tomorrow (Wednesday 26th August) where he will perform at the opening concert at the magnificent Fort Christo Punto, with an 11-piece orchestra. The show will be streamed live via Boiler Room from 8.30pm Croatian local time (7:30pm UK time).
Elaenia will be released on LP, CD and digital download. All pre-orders of Elaenia via the store at www.floatingpoints.co.uk will receive ‘Silhouettes (I, II & III)’ instantly, and the first 100 orders will receive a print of the album artwork created by the harmonograph Sam built.
Elaenia can also be pre-ordered at Rough Trade and iTunes.
TRACKLIST
1. Nespole
2. Silhouettes (I, II & III)
3. Elaenia
4. Argenté
5. Thin Air
6. For Marmish
7. Peroration Six
Discover more about Floating Points on Inverted Audio.