Floating Points - Elaenia 3 Items

Floating Points’ first productions emerged in 2008 and 2009, around the same time that he moved from Manchester to London (where he, fairly famously, studied neuroscience). He collaborated with early supporter Alexander Nut on Eglo, a label that has housed music by Fatima, Funkineven and Floating Points himself. Eglo has remained the main home for Floating Points’ music, though he’s also released on Planet Mu, Ninja Tune and Border Community. He also played a key role at now-closed London club Plastic People, as both a resident and a sounding board for its set-up.

For Elaenia’s artwork, Floating Points “built a harmonograph from scratch to create the artwork for Elaenia, the end result created by using it and 2 fibre optic cables of 0.5 and 1.5mm diameters, which were connected to light sources responding to bass drum and white noise percussive sounds from the album track ‘For Marmish’.”

The album features various contributors, including Tom Skinner and Leo Taylor (drums), Rahel Debebe-Dessalegne and Layla Rutherford (vocals), Susumu Mukai (bass), Alex Reeve (guitar), Qian Wu and Edward Benton (violin), Matthew Kettle (viola) and Joe Zeitlin (cello). Floating Points also contributes vocals.

LP includes download card!

For the past ten years, all roads Shepherd has followed have been slowly leading to Elaenia - an album with roots deep in his formative years, and one that draws upon everything Shepherd has done so far. An album that provides context to the music that Shepherd has been making to date. Every DJ set he’s performed, every talent he has produced, every composition he has written are thought of as precursors to Elaenia - a dazzling score which puts Shepherd in the spotlight as a composer who has produced an album that bridges the gap between his rapturous dance music and formative classical roots. Drawing inspiration from classical, jazz, electronic music, soul and even Brazilian popular music, Elaenia - named after the bird of the same name - is the epitome of the forward-thinking Floating Points vision in 2015.