The title track of Sam Shepherd's debut album as Floating Points was inspired by a dream: A migratory bird strays from its flock and is swallowed up by the forest, mimicking the way our atoms are absorbed into the fabric of the universe when we die (or so goes one theory, anyway). We might find ourselves "reincarnated as a SIM card in Singapore, or as a beetle in Scotland," as Shepherd told Pitchfork recently.
He recorded the song "Elaenia" the very next morning, and its improvised, fluid form mirrors the dream's holistic vision. Made with just a Fender Rhodes electric piano and a handful of arcane synthesizers, it bobs between gurgles and limpid, lyric melodies. At more than seven minutes long, it is the second-longest song on the album, and also the most spare— just a handful of chords, some rumble, and a lot of nuance. Like an ocean swell, it is simple on the surface but complex beneath, and the same could be said of Elaenia as a whole.
Though comparatively short—just seven songs totaling some 43 minutes—Elaenia is rich and welcoming, balancing Shepherd's intelligence with intuition. Flitting between strange time signatures and simple pulses, it utilizes mostly analog synthesizers, pairing them with live instrumentation: electric bass, guitar, piano, live drums, and strings. It is as warm and fluid an "electronic" album as you will hear all year, and it has a timeless feel: There's no reason it could not have been written and recorded 10, 20, or even 30 years ago.
For long-time fans of the UK producer, musician, and DJ, Elaenia feels both like a surprise and a logical extension of his previous singles and EPs. Rhythms are played, not looped or sampled; the album skirts the edges of the dancefloor, flitting between ambient miniatures and extended jams falling somewhere between post-rock and jazz fusion. But nothing here feels like a radical departure, which is a testament to Shepherd's gradual process of refinement. He is trained in neuroscience and epigenetics, but it would be just as easy to imagine him as a furniture builder who had spent the past six years working on a single desk. The underlying structure of his work has remained more or less constant for years, but with every recording, it gets a little smoother, a little more perfect, inching a little closer to its ideal form.
Shepherd has cited Talk Talk as an inspiration, and you can hear the influence of albums like Laughing Stock on the porous fabric of Elaenia. It's a record best heard loud, because the quiet parts can be very quiet, and its spirit lies less in melodies or even moods than in tiny details. With the exception of the cosmic jazz-leaning "Silhouettes (1,11,111)", you're left less with hummable themes than with small, passing moments: the burnished gleam of a lone Rhodes key hit hard, a faint scrap of radio static, soft notes that cling to each other like burrs.
In keeping with the transfiguration theme, the music seems to have no stable center at all. It moves like clouds in the sky, slowly and imperceptibly shape-shifting, and at any given moment, what's being played matters less than how we arrived at that point. The sense of an unbroken line is paramount, leading to the album's final thrill when it is suddenly yanked up at a 45-degree angle. In five minutes it goes from silence to jet-engine loud. Synthesizers snarl, the string section goes into overdrive, and the drum kit rolls on inexorably, explosion upon explosion. The song, "Peroration Six", is the only one where you feel Shepherd and company really letting loose. It's a revelation and a rush, a full-on "Fuck yeah!" shouted into the coming storm. The last thing we hear sounds almost like a wrong note, and then it's all simply cut short. The silence is deafening; it feels like waking up from a very heavy dream.
