On paper, Sam Shepherd makes an unlikely dance-music trailblazer. There’s the PhD in neuroscience. There’s his gentle demeanour, more akin to a bookish vinyl nerd than a international 24-hour party boy. And there’s his handmade album artwork – drawn using a harmonograph that he built in his studio himself. The 29-year-old also likes to test his audience: his forthcoming live shows will feature an 11-piece orchestra; for a recent six-hour set at Berlin techno haven Berghain – a booking that was “as much to my surprise as everyone else’s” – he played the the 20-minute track Harvest Time by spiritual jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders in its entirety.
In addition, Shepherd is, perhaps, the only musician to have been given a philosophy book during a DJ set. “A girl came up to me at a gig in San Francisco and said, ‘I think you might like this, you should read it,’” he recalls, sipping at a rhubarb gin that matches his top. “It was a David Eagleman book called Sum, which is 40 short stories about what the afterlife might be and atomic reincarnation, where you get to heaven and God is presented to you as a bacteria, and of the absorbance of life …” I give him a look that suggests he has lost me. “I know,” he says, and laughs.
We’re in Brilliant Corners, a low lit DJ bar-restaurant in Dalston, east London, where discerning vintage sounds spill out of an expensive-looking speaker stack behind us. Shepherd, however, isn’t a tiresome chinstroker. Under the Zen-like moniker Floating Points, his DJ sets are brainy but banging; his own productions distil his spiritual jazz, classical, soul and broken-beat influences (by his hazy estimation, he owns 10,000 vinyl records) into sparky house and techno shufflers. He can release an EP with a string ensemble, but he can also entertain the face chompers at 6am.
Still, Shepherd finds it frustrating that he is often made out to be some sort of techno Einstein. “The worst question I get asked is the one where people try and draw a parallel between science and music,” he groans. “It is possible that the two exist exclusively of each other, but apparently that’s not a good enough answer.” As a young boy, Shepherd was a chorister at Manchester Cathedral and went on to study piano at Chetham’s School of Music. His father is a vicar and the family vicarage turned into a studio for musical experiments: “I could set up cellos in the kitchen, drum kits in my sister’s room,” he says mischievously. A teacher gave him some jazz records and it was then that he “stopped thinking of classical and jazz as two different things”, and started seeing them harmoniously. “Kenny Wheeler is so beautiful that [his music] could have been Rachmaninov,” he enthuses. “And Bill Evans is similar to the colourfulness of Debussy.”
Meanwhile, his appetite for records became serious. When he moved to London to study for his PhD, he would save up his student loan to travel around the US hunting for old music. “We’d go digging for weeks, stay in motels, and bring back as many records as we could find,” he says. “They were cheaper than CDs.” He learned how to DJ properly by watching the owners of Peabody Records in Chicago, which also perhaps inspired his love of the marathon set. “They would start playing tunes at 10am and go through the records that had been brought in all day. I saw it and thought, that’s how it’s done.”
Today, Shepherd has kindred spirits and close friends in Four Tet (Kieran Hebden) and Caribou (Dan Snaith). They have a passion for obscure records, and enjoy throwing low-key parties on the fly, where the guilty blue glow of Shazam is always peeking out of someone’s pocket near the booth. Here, in Brilliant Corners’ intimate backroom, Shepherd and Hebden recently hosted an impromptu Sunday-night party – just for fun. The weekend after, all three played at Hebden’s Brixton Academy all-nighter where, in the face of inflated ticket prices, they only charged £5 to get in.
The place that most inspired their idealistic approach to club culture was Shoreditch’s Plastic People, which closed in January this year. The trio would often DJ there together, holding that music heard on a decent sound system in pitch-black, with no distractions, had the power to take you somewhere else. “Everyone on the dancefloor was one body,” says Shepherd of the memorable nights in that rave basement. “You felt like something more than the music, something entirely transcendental, was happening. The ambience in the room and everything came together in a way that was more than the sum of its parts.”
He could as easily be talking about his debut album, Elaenia. Comprised of seven “suites”, it builds delicately with strings, piano, dizzying time signatures, dappling synths and drones until it engulfs you. Silhouettes (I, II & III) starts with a restless drumbeat and blossoms into 10 cinematic minutes of romantic, careening strings and a steady swell of choir-like voices. The titular track – inspired by a poetic dream that Shepherd had about a bird trapped in a forest, after reading Eagleman’s Sum – is more abstract, a pearlescent piano melody caught in layers of static and synth. Some songs implode, others turn inside out.
Much of this experimental composition is filtered through a contemporary prism of influences, some more intentional than others. The final track, Peroration Six, is like something Radiohead might have come out with during an unhinged Kid A take. But Shepherd was particularly drawn to the recording of Talk Talk’s 1991 album Laughing Stock. He tried many of its techniques, down to the oil projectors that the band used to create an intense studio atmosphere. “Listening to that record is where I started to realise that you can’t separate the music from the recording,” he explains. “So if you work hard at making records sound a certain way then it can enhance the music itself.”
Like his favourite spiritual jazz records, Elaenia is improvisational and designed to be heard in one go. But Shepherd says he “finds it difficult to reconcile not being religious with being into spiritual music”. Instead, he admires the genre architecturally. “Spiritual jazz, for me, feels like building a space out of nothing and within that space [the musicians] build their house, their city, their entire universe through music,” he says excitedly. “They exist in this black hole and they create an amazing place without form, without structure, without harmonic beginnings …”
All of which, to be honest, is starting to sound a bit rollneck jumper. But Shepherd winces at the idea of anyone using the word “jazzy” to describe his music, as if it could be found on the kind of compilation that would’ve played in a hotel lobby in 1998. “It’s very sad to be misunderstood. You can press play and have prejudices about what jazz is or isn’t, but I like to imagine I make music that doesn’t require the listener to have any prior knowledge or reference points.” After all, he adds, “what kind of boring music is that?”
Elaenia is anything but boring; even in its chaos, it is beautiful. It builds like a hypnotic DJ set – a soothing balm after a hard day in the office; a respite from a packed train full of screaming children where you can’t sit down. Some people are angry Shepherd hasn’t made Floating Points: The Bangerz album, he says, but he hopes they will find Elaenia “inviting in some way” in spite of that. “I would like to feel that a person walks into an empty room and that, through listening to the record, the room is built for them without trying to push them out at any point,” he explains. “I’m trying to draw people in.”
You don’t need a thesis to enter Sam Shepherd’s lab – an open mind will do.
Elaenia is out on Pluto Records on 6 November. Floating Points plays live at Islington Assembly Hall, London N1, on 17 November.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion