Floating Points – Cascade review

The music business is a hard one, especially in the post-copyright, post-royalties, post-radio world, so it’s a temptation for some non-mainstream artists to go with the flow, but to his immense credit as Floating Points Sam Shepherd has spent the last fifteen years largely doing the opposite.

In fact, his adopted moniker has summed up his career path such as it’s been, from acclaimed early work to running labels to a fascinating side project with jazz legend Pharoah Sanders, to scoring the ballet Mere Mortals. Depending on your point of view the last ‘proper’ Floating Points album was 2019’s Crush, a dazzlingly layered exercise in the pursuit of a singular creative vision.

All of that made second guessing Cascade something of a fool’s errand, but across the nine tracks it’s as close to the standard precepts of contemporary electronic music as you could expect Shepherd to get. Obliquely name checking his home city of Manchester on Key 103 and Affleck’s Palace, there’s an appropriately Hacienda tint to both, but the peak amongst many is Fast Forward, cosmic techno which manages to sound immediate and abstract in equal measure. It’s a dirty business, but doing what you want and doing it as well as this seems to be the right approach.

You can read a full review here.