The work of Sam Shepherd, as Floating Points, has always sat right on the dividing line between electronic and organic.
On the one hand, this is music clearly indebted to clubbing, to 4/4 kick drums, to UK Garage and everything that followed, to Aphex Twin and Four Tet and Autechre. On the other, his compositions ebb and flow like classical symphonies, they flicker and burble like something half-seen, they have a distinctly human imperfection to them.
The live show for Shepherd’s latest album [and one of Overblown’s favourite albums of 2024], Cascade, takes this concept and extends it to every aspect of the live experience. As expected, Shepherd is behind a desk stacked high with audio equipment: modular synthesizers, drum machines, even a theremin. But crucially, he’s not alone on stage – flanking him are visual artist Akiko Nakayama, and harpist Miriam Adefris, with each adding a crucially live element to the show.
Nakayama is creating her ‘Alive Paintings’ – long the visual language of Floating Points albums, featured on the cover of the last two, she uses the show as an occasion to create them on the fly by brushing, dipping and swirling ink through fairy-liquid coated water. Combine this with a close camera, live lighting and liquid pulsating in time with the set itself, and the results are extraordinary, the visuals and music feeling totally in dialogue with one another.
Adefris, on the other hand, adds a new dimension to the music itself. At the start, the stage is in complete darkness, with her sat at the harp and Shepherd manipulating his box of tricks almost imperceptibly (to begin with). She begins by playing tracks from the wider Floating Points discography that lend themselves less to the high-energy live show, beatless deep cuts that create a gently spiralling atmosphere. Shepherd begins to slowly work her sound through his signal chain, echo and delay creeping in, and then he starts playing alongside her, synth lines soaring alongside her harp.
This first portion of the show ends when drums begin to pulse under the mix, and the crowd starts swaying, as Shepherd embarks on an almost entirely rhythmic salvo, with no melody at all. Galloping drum loops verge on jungle-esque breaks, and sometimes fall over into noise, with the odd flash of sub bass in the mix, too. He tests the crowd’s patience here, elongating and elongating the break without any discernible structure, before the driving bass of ‘Birth4000’ begins to rise from the murk, and the clubbier part of the set begins in earnest.
From here on out the setlist flirts with music that could easily be heard in Room 1 of Fabric. Four-to-the-floor kick drums, crescendos and drops, hands-in-the-air euphoria. But as ever with Floating Points, there’s always a complication, these moments of club machinery always counterweighted by a shimmering synth loop, or lurking polyrhythms. But that’s not in any way a criticism – if anything, it makes those moments of euphoria feel earned, Shepherd making you work for them.
The importance of the visuals in all of this can’t be overstated – Nakayama provides a beautiful accompaniment, feeling almost more like standing in an art installation than a club environment. This is only amplified, too, by the lighting and projection trickery of long-time Floating Points collaborators Hamill Industries, who at times manipulate the images on screen so seamlessly that you can’t quite believe it isn’t a pre-recorded backdrop.
The setlist is mostly dedicated to material from Cascade, although ‘Anasickmodular’ from Crush gets an outing too, and it never feels lacking for this focus on recent material. It’s testament to that album really, that everything feels so of a piece – it’s a record that in many ways feels like a live performance translated to the studio, and these songs ebb and flow effortlessly into one another. The headiest heights were definitely to be found in the chopped vocal samples of ‘Vocoder’, and the crunchy, rolling bass of ‘Fast Forward’, although you’d be hard-pressed to put your finger on where any one song ends and the next begins.
The only disappointment here is the room itself – the shows (this was the second in a run of four) – took place at HERE at Outernet, a small club room that certainly had the audio-visual setup to translate the graphic element of the show, but lacks the communal feel of some of the big-room shows Shepherd has done on this tour. Having seen this same setlist at festivals like We Out Here and All Points East, there’s something about these club-adjacent songs that feel like they need 10,000 people with their hands up to truly be done justice.
That aside, it was a truly compelling, almost three-hour show from one of electronic music’s most intelligent and instinctive musicians. It’s difficult to think of anyone else that could compose on the fly as he does here, whilst having one foot in the world of the concerto, and one in the nightclub. A truly generational electronic talent, translating the insular world of his recordings effortlessly into an entrancing performance.
