Bleep

Sam Shepherd has travelled to many places since his 2019 LP Crush. Through electrical storms of headlining club concoctions, across musical planes in his highly regarded collaborations with Pharaoh Sanders and The London Symphony Orchestra, and deep into sensory techno-mythology for San Francisco Ballet's Mere Mortals. Once again in the Californian deserts, where the Jovian marble textures of Crush have become liquid flows dusted with gold, he looks to his Manchester origins and crystallises the Floating Points tour that never was. His latest album Cascade brims and jitters with all the rave potential energy stored over the past 5 years, waiting to be unleashed.

Imbued with references to his childhood landmarks, Cascade contains the kind of virtuoso flexibility you would expect from someone who studied classical composition and club production in the same breath. The pinprick melodies of ‘Key103’ slip through each other like records in a voracious young Shepherd's hands, growing citric and acidic with each garage shuffle and stomp. A wailing soprano synth brings the track to its peak, before dropping into the hardcore club territory that Floating Points thrives in.

Taking the 2022 single to new heights, the plucky plinky stabs and roiling bass of ‘Vocoder [Club Mix]’ undergo subtle transformations, as the track's titular effect descends into razed synth furores when bouncing technoid rhythms sink their teeth into stuttering vocal edits. ‘Del Oro’ goes further, its determined mosquito buzz always driving the bustling drums to a total frenzy, paving the way for utopian detuned synth glitters to be swapped for dextrous serrated bass on the analogue-worshipping ‘Fast Forward’, or the pure acid-washed breakbeat ruckus tearing apart ‘Afflecks Palace’. This is the cathartic, intense physicality of dance music that Shepherd was longing for on those desert nights, and it's glorious.