Floating Points | Artist
Samuel Shepherd aka Floating Points is a British electronic music producer, DJ, and musician born 1986 in Manchester, UK. He is the founder of Pluto Records, co-founder of Eglo Records and leader of a 16-piece group called Floating Points Ensemble. Shepherd studied piano at Chetham's School of Music before receiving a PhD in neuroscience and epigenetics at University College London. In the late 2000s Shepherd worked as a DJ at Plastic People, a London club, then began releasing work under the Floating Points moniker in 2008. In late 2008, Shepherd and Alexander Nut launched the Eglo record label which released music by Floating Points and other artists. In 2010, Shepherd performed with a 16-piece live incarnation of Floating Points, entitled the Floating Points Ensemble. The group won an award for "Best BBC Radio 1 Maida Vale Session". In 2015, Shepherd founded Pluto records and released the debut Floating Points album Eleania, and the highly rated EP Kuiper on the label. Shepherd has gone on to release three more excellent albums: Crush (2019), Promises (2021), and Cascade (2024). In addition there have been seven EP's, including 2017's excellent Reflections: Mojave Desert, recorded in the Mojave Desert when Shepherd and his band were rehearsing for their upcoming US tour. 2021's Promises was made in collaboration with veteran avant-garde jazz trumpeter Pharoah Sanders, and the London Symphony Orchestra. It was nominated for the Mercury Prize 2021 and reached #6 in the Official UK Albums Chart and #1 in the Official UK Vinyl Albums Chart. Sanders befriended Shepherd when he heard the album Elaenia and proposed they produce a collaborative album for which Shepherd composed the music and played electronic and acousic instruments. After Sanders' death in 2022, Shepherd put together a one-time live performance of the album at the Hollywood Bowl, conducted by Miguel Atwood-Ferguson with an ensemble cast including Kieran Hebden, Dan Snaith, Shabaka Hutchings, Kara Lis Coverdale, and Hinako Omori. The Independent reviewed the performance, calling it “A near perfect body of music paired with a beautiful tribute” and gave it 4/5 stars. The most recent album Cascade is also attracting rave reviews for its exquisitely produced minimalistic dance tracks with hypnotic-trance synth parts. As for musical inpirations, Shepherd cites classical artists Claude Debussy and Olivier Messiaen, plus Bill Evans and Kenny Wheeler from the jazz world. His gateway into the electronic music was a little studio in his school that no one was using, as he explained. "It was just a little tape machine studio with an S950 and an Atari computer, very basic. My teacher started showing me Stockhausen and synthesists like Morton Subotnick. When I heard this out there stuff that didn’t have any tonal sense or rhythm I thought, "Wow, this is meaningless, and that was like a whole new level of meaning".
Artist Website: floatingpoints.co.uk
Featured Albums: Floating Points
Related Artists: Sam Shepherd, Pharoah Sanders
