Cascade

This album has been added to 3 public lists:

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  2024 Top 20

  Adam Wood

  Call me an uncultured philistine, but Floating Points’ last full-length outing—in the company of Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra—left me a little cold. Not only did I see that record at the top of multiple lists at the end of 2021, I have heard people say that it’s their favourite record of the last decade. To this unrefined palate however, it came as welcome news that Sam Shepherd had a new solo album in the works—his first since Crush took ninth spot for me at the end of 2019. Of that record’s intricate beats and dense loops, I wrote ‘the listening experience is akin to visiting a gallery of impressionist visual art - sometimes bewildering, at points confrontational, but constantly intriguing and compelling.’ By comparison, Cascade is markedly more straightforward, with Shepherd reaching into his bag of tricks to extract big techno-adjacent rhythms and 1990s acid bass lines. The result is an hour long trip through some of the most compelling electronica I encountered this year. Like Crush before it, Cascade works with AirPods in, but also plays on the level of a measured, confident club set.

  This album dropped a week ahead of Jamie xx’s In Waves (see above at 5), and for a few weeks I had the two in lock-step, one after the other in a loop. Both are exceptional showcases for masters at conjuring mood from electronic composition. Whereas In Waves is more forthright in its bid to conjure euphoria, Floating Points’ genius here is teasing nuance out of big sounds rooted in throwback dancefloor genres.

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  z0z4

  jzfski 💭

  🇬🇧

  Tech House, IDM

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  Bubbling

  Darby Dixon III