Floating Points: Cascade review – an enthralling record of out-and-out bangers

Long ago, Sam Shepherd was a neuro-epigenetics PhD student by day and a DJ by night who, like his friends Four Tet and Caribou, knew how to wax a dancefloor. As Floating Points , he released fluid, shapeshifting electro-acoustic music that played to the feet but never at the expense of the head or the heart. After two exceptional studio albums came Promises , his 2021 magnum opus with the London Symphony Orchestra, featuring the last major recordings of the late jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders . Since then, Shepherd has scored a rapturously received ballet . An anime for Cowboy Bebop animator Shinichirō Watanabe is in the works.

Cascade , Shepherd’s first wholly Floating Points album since Crush (2019), is, enthrallingly, made up almost entirely of dancefloor-adjacent bangers, each unique in their tinkering with genre, tempo and chosen instrumentation. The elliptical, nearly nine-minute Ocotillo features the harp of Austrian-Ethiopian musician Miriam Adefris and a clavichord that belonged to Shepherd’s great-aunt . He loves a modular synth, and giddy, Doppler-like oscillations fill the eight-minute-plus runtime of Fast Forward, reaching a kind of retro-futurist rave epiphany on Afflecks Palace. The absolutely slapping Birth4000 , meanwhile, pays cheeky tribute to Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s I Feel Love; it’s just a crying shame the album doesn’t find room for the 7½ minute extended remix .