Released: 2024
Sam Shepherd is probably one of the last artist/producers you’d expect to wake up one morning and think “You know what, I’m just going to do an album full of heaters”, but as if fifteen years of swimming against the tide had been enough – temporarily – then Cascade proved itself to be exactly that.
Similarly to the likes of Daniel Avery, Shepherd had spent time exploring the further reaches of electronic music, including work with jazz legend Pharoah Sanders and scoring the ballet Mere Mortals. For his first album in five years however the orientation was deep, late night and unrelenting in a brain feeding way.
Taking threads of his home city of Manchester and it’s contribution to dance music noise and culture, whilst Birth4000 gave Donna Summer’s I Feel Love an acid house makeover, it was Fast Forward that made any further questions meaningless. On it the techno harps and arpeggios mixed with galactic wave noise, the result a track for stargazing from the dancefloor’s pulsing centre. Bangers? Sam Shepherd can do those too.
The Voice Of Unreason 