Most people would not bring a harp to a rave. But UK producer Floating Points – Sam Shepherd – is emphatically not most people: an uncommon artist as au fait with acoustic instruments and spiritual jazz as he is DJing to a delirious club.
There are a great many people who can push faders while bobbing about, headphones half on, half off. But few have Shepherd’s range. On his spatial, guitar band-adjacent album Reflections: Mojave Desert (2017), he used mountains as reverb, blasting his music into the California hills and then recording what came back. His celebrated 2021 record Promises looped the London Symphony Orchestra in with jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders. It was Sanders’s last recording before he died in 2022.
