FLOATING POINTS

Crush NINJA TUNE 8/10

Polymath electronic composer’s kaleidoscopic third album.

DESPITE his widely respected reputation as a boundarypushing polymath and sonically promiscuous club DJ, electro-jazz boffin Sam Shepherd has flirted a little too heavily with overly cerebral tastefulness on previous albums. Two years ago, his site-specific post-rock project Reflections – Mojave Desert saw the young Mancunian composer embracing Floydian soundscape territory with a full band, to sporadically sublime but somewhat sedate effect. Music as art installation can be a fertile pursuit, but it dilutes Shepherd’s full spectrum of passions, from circuit-bending modular synth experiments to marathon late-night sets at Plastic People and Berghain.

Shepherd’s third album, and first for Ninja Tune, gives a richer account of his different musical personalities, however. Full of densely detailed textural and tonal digressions, Crush draws on a broad jazz, classical and avant-garde hinterland. There are even wry allusions here to his shadow academic career as a neuroscientist with a PHD in the rarefied field of epigenetics. Even so, this album still feels like Shepherd’s most accessible, dancefloorminded, party-friendly collection to date.

Crush was born from a series of semiimprovised live performances two years ago, when Shepherd opened for his friends The xx on tour. And it shows, at least in places. Zippy, kinetic cuts like “Lesalpx” and “Bias” are arguably his most straightforward engagements with the grammar of mainstream techno-rave music yet: all loops and drops, ambient washes and bleepy hooks, skeletal melodic motifs and gnarly acid-adjacent basslines.

Shepherd’s initial conceit for these live shows was to try and sound like a digital-age cousin of cult pastoral krautrock supergroup Harmonia. There are exploratory jamming vibes to tracks like “Environments”, which begins in a mist of mournful techno whalesong before exploding into a vivid splurge of pixelated shimmers and pointillist beats. But more often he lands closer to Aphex Twin or Autechre terrain with fissile detours into anarcho-breakbeat territory such as “Last Bloom” or “Anasickmodular”, which marry woozy childlike melodies with wild eruptions of squelch, clatter and splatter.

But for all its proudly modernist studioas-instrument ethos, Crush is also an old-fashioned chamber-orchestral album of sorts. Shepherd worked alongside live woodwind and string players on most of these tracks, painstakingly scoring their parts before warping and glitching the results into exotic new hybrid forms. This fluid formal crossover runs throughout, but is crystallised best on a couple of standout tunes. The opening “Falaise” is a gorgeous confection of clarinet fanfares and viola flurries that shudder, ripple and blossom into fragrant floral effusions before gathering force in a lustrous Philip Glass crescendo.

In more playful vein, “Requiem For CS70 And Strings” is a wistful exercise in affectionate classical pastiche, from its knowingly parodic title to its pulsing Henry Purcell-style refrain, over which Shepherd plays wonky electric piano that both enhances and deconstructs the sombre underlying mood. A mischievous musical joke on one level, but also an inventive, oddly lovely collision of knowingly ahistorical musical elements. A pianist by training, Shepherd’s keyboards dominate several more tranquil numbers, like the gently tumbling instrumental “Birth” and the contemplative, twinkly, Satie-esque lullaby “Sea-watch”.

The instrumental credits of Crush will entice retro electronica nerds, with legendary analogue synths such as the Yamaha CS70, Buchla 200, ARP 2600 and EMS Synthi all featured. There is also a delicious steampunk poetry in the arsenal of vintage flanging, filtering and pitchshifting gizmos deployed here, from the 4MS Spectral Multiband Resonator to the Marshall Time Modulator and the Publison Infernal Machine. Shepherd also finds creative use for the Binson Echorec, a rare Italian tape echo favoured by Pink Floyd in their psychedelic prime.

Crush may be a collaborative effort on paper but Shepherd remains the author, conductor and musical director of Floating Points. He cheerfully describes himself as a megalomaniac, weighing and approving every sonic detail personally. This singleminded vision comes into sharpest relief on the final sister tracks, “Apoptose Pt1” and “Apoptose Pt2”, solo compositions woven from electric piano, analogue synth and the knotty rhythmic jabber of a vintage German drum machine. There is a haunted beauty in these antique Radiophonic reveries, the ghost of lost futures, adrift on the airwaves for all infinity.

The title of both tracks alludes to that hoary old rock’n’roll theme of programmed cell death within growing organisms – and yet they provide a suitably eccentric finale to Shepherd’s most eclectic album to date, a richly pleasurable balancing act between brain and body, academic seminar and nightclub, cerebral experiment and sensory feast.