Uitgebracht
December 2010
- Alongside a classical and jazz schooling, associations with Planet Mu and Ninja Tune and an ongoing Ph.D in human biology, this debut single from Sam Shepherd's Floating Points Ensemble project—which is, as you'd expect, an instrumental ensemble headed by himself on Fender Rhodes and Sequential Circuits Pro One and Prophet keyboards—will give fans one more thing to love about him.
The most immediately striking thing about Post Suite is its assuredness. Shepherd seems to have a remarkable skill with scoring, as the harmonies, progressions, and instrumentation resemble The Cinematic Orchestra in their drifting, warm jazz stylings. The use of just-outside-the-obvious chords which sometimes seem only to regard the one preceding, the ethereal way it meanders freely into different sections, the riff in "Almost In Profile" that's unostentatious but still present, the Eastern strings in "Post Suite"... They all place an individual stamp on the tracks. And perhaps most importantly, the soothing glow of his productions as Floating Points is there as well.
There is room for development though. The flipside to the dreaminess is that it's slightly on the transient side. The title track drops off suddenly, whereas a gradual ebb might have made it more special, and an excursion into different territory on the B-side—both tracks are quite similar—would really make the package. But these are tweaks, not huge changes, and based on Post Suite, it's safe to expect that we'll see this talented young man continue to build on his already considerable achievements.
Tracklist A Post Suite
B Almost In Profile