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The year 2023 marks 30 years since Yakushima was registered as Japan's first World Natural Heritage site in 1993.
And what is the world like today, 20 years after the release of Final Drop "elements" (2003), a masterpiece produced by DJ KENSEI, GoRo the Vibratian, Kaoru Inoue, and KND, and known by many?
We modern people are constantly bombarded with so much information that we wonder if we are living our lives in a way that allows us to interact with nature, enjoy it, and refine our sensibilities.
Listening to Final Drop's latest work, "Mimyo," one is reminded of something universal and important.
Mimyo" was produced in January 2023 by DJ Kensei, one of Japan's top DJs, who creates original sound spaces through a variety of selections and sound controls, and GoRo the Vibration artist, who manipulates didgeridoo, kalimba, mouth harp, flute, hand pan, percussion, and self-made musical instruments. The project started with the reunion of artist GoRo the Vibratian after 20 years.
DJ KENSEI, GoRo the Vibratian, Kaoru Inoue, and KND, who are usually active in Japan and overseas as solo artists, DJs, musicians, and sound engineers, respectively, have been working on a project that brings together a vast amount of sound files saved during a field recording session in Yakushima in 2002. KND, an electronic musician/producer/sound engineer and member of SOFT, the most important band in the Kyoto underground scene, was approached by DJ KENSEI to compile the files, which DJ KENSEI and GoRo the Vibratian then used as the basis for the project. DJ KENSEI and GoRo the Vibratian built, produced, and mixed this new work.
This is a must-listen work with a number of spiritual, deep, afro and ambient spiritual organic grooves!
Spiritual Afro, NEW WAVE, Ambient Dance Music! A number of miraculous sound sources that include African music, contemporary music, natural sounds from NEW WAVE and field recording, and even jazz and folklore tastes from Spain. It seems that he was influenced by many music genres, but the music is a beautiful combination of ambient and spiritual extracts, and the track with the synthesizer has a new age that is similar to that of IASOS! Great content that would not have been possible without an aesthetic eye for sharp music. 16P booklet included. Commentary posted in Spanish / English / Japanese.
This is a must-listen work with a number of spiritual, deep, afro and ambient spiritual organic grooves!
Spiritual Afro, NEW WAVE, Ambient Dance Music! A number of miraculous sound sources that include African music, contemporary music, natural sounds from NEW WAVE and field recording, and even jazz and folklore tastes from Spain. It seems that he was influenced by many music genres, but the music is a beautiful combination of ambient and spiritual extracts, and the track with the synthesizer has a new age that is similar to that of IASOS! Great content that would not have been possible without an aesthetic eye for sharp music. 16P booklet included. Commentary posted in Spanish / English / Japanese.
* "Africae" is an old name for "Africa" in Europe based on Latin, and adding "finis" creates nuances such as the farthest land and unknown places.
+ Japanese / English publication
+ CD version: Paper jacket, liner included
+ LP version: Liner included
* "Africae" is an old name for "Africa" in Europe based on Latin, and adding "finis" creates nuances such as the farthest land and unknown places.
+ Japanese / English publication
+ CD version: Paper jacket, liner included
+ LP version: Liner included
The second installment of Finis Africae is finally the appearance of the Anno song! A 6-track mini-album titled "El Secreto de las Doss (The Secret of Midnight)", a Balearic classic that has been played since the 1980s! There is no duplication of content with the previous work "A Last Discovery"! !!
"El Secreto" is a song from Finis Africae's 1st album released in 1984, by Jose Padilla, DJ of the cafe "Cafe del Mar (Sea Cafe)" in Ibiza, Balearis Islands. I fell in love with it and quickly defined it as a "chill-out" tune. It is a chill-out classic that has been recorded on mixtapes that he has been selling for a long time, and has been established as an organic groove classic beyond the ambient techno / house era.
It seems that only "El Secreto" is recognized in the DJ world, but Finis Africae is a unit that has crossed over various sounds independently with an experimental feeling since NEW WAVE (leader Huang Alberto). There are many songs that have the same impact as "El Secreto" (also famous for musical instrument nerds), and there are also fans who love the essence. In this album, Finis Africae's "Ambient" degree is deeply cut, and works comparable to "El Secreto" are compiled from the 1st / 2nd / 3rd album. There is no dance music, only deep listening is supported. The deepest part of Finis Africa, dense 32 minutes! (It is also an ant to play as ambient music)
+ 48khz / 24bit latest remaster. CD and LP versions are separate masters
ring.
+ LP version: Enclosed in a single-sided perforated sleeve.
+ CD version: Maxi case included.
Flaming Tunes' sole release is perhaps the finest elegy to the '80s home recording ethos that you've never heard. Originally released in 1985 on cassette (with individually hand-colored covers), this self-titled album grew out of the collaboration between childhood friends Gareth Williams and Mary Currie.
Williams is best known as a member of English art-rock band This Heat. After leaving the group in the early '80s, he travelled to India where he studied classical Kathakali dance – an experience that would profoundly shape the music of Flaming Tunes.
In an old Victorian house in South London, the duo recorded during the day while Currie's young son attended school and Williams conducted tape treatments at night. They were joined by various guests including This Heat guitarist Charles Bullen as well as long-term collaborators Martin Harrison and Rick Wilson.
Using whatever instruments they had on hand (clarinet, piano, bells, etc.), Flaming Tunes create lo-fi melodies around simple arrangements, oblique rhythms and densely layered natural sounds. The results are a mesmeric collage of instrumental daydreams and sideways pop songs, floating into one another in a hazy confluence of late '60s Canterbury psych-folk and early Residents experimentation.
All of these beguiling elements converge in a personal manner, quietly insistent in listeners' ears like the blood pulsing in one's veins on a warm summer day.
Sam Shepherd aka Floating Points has shared a new single, 'Birth4000', which is out now via Ninja Tune.
'Birth4000' couldn't be more different sonically to these pursuits in its crunchy, gnarled, all-out energy. Officially out now, the track has already had a lasting impact on the summer's dancefloors having been played out by Four Tet at his Finsbury Park headline show as well as gracing Arcadia’s industrial spider when played by Shepherd and Caribou b2b at this year’s Glastonbury, also appearing in festival sets from Peggy Gou, Ben UFO, Call Super, Palms Trax and more, as well as being the highlight of Shepherd's secret headline slot at this year's NTS summer party.
The track's artwork comes from Tokyo based artist Akiko Nakayama. Nakayama is a painter who depicts the beauty of conveying energy metamorphosis through media such as installation, videos, and performance. She brings painting to life by combining the energy of movement and the vibrance of colours, called "Alive Painting".
Sam Shepherd aka Floating Points has announced his new album Cascade will be released on 13 September via Ninja Tune. Along with the announcement Shepherd has shared lead single 'Key103' which comes with visuals continuing his ongoing collaboration with Tokyo based artist Akiko Nakayama.
Cascade is an eruption of unfinished business. In late 2022, Shepherd – renowned for drifting between genres as freely as his stage name implies – found himself in the Californian desert working on something new. Mere Mortals, his first ballet score, created with the San Francisco Ballet, was to be a collision of sound and dance exploring the ancient parable of Pandora through the prism of technology. "It was one of quite a few left turns I was taking around that time", recalls Shepherd. You can say that again: Promises, his multiple end-of-year-list-topping previous record, released in 2021, had seen him swap his typical modular synth tapestries and intricate drum patterns for airy dreamscapes, crafted with late legendary saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra. It was a collaboration so popular, a Mercury Prize nomination and sold-out show at the Hollywood Bowl in September 2023 followed.
Between these projects and an upcoming anime score for Adult Swim - from the outside it might have seemed as though Shepherd was departing the dance floor for good. But as he wrote his ballet score by day, at night he found himself longing for the sweaty communion of a dance floor. For the pulse-racing abandon of electronic music.
Shepherd released Crush, his rave-reviewed second studio album, in November 2019. It was hailed as one of the albums of that year by Pitchfork, The Independent, Mixmag, Loud And Quiet and more – "but I never got to explore its ravey, experimental side live", laments the musician, whose world tour was cancelled due to lockdown. Cascade was devised as a follow-on from Crush that would allow him (and audiences) to experience Floating Points in its traditional form on a dancefloor once more: bursting with Buchla rhythms, glitching melodies bewitching a room full of heaving bodies. "It’s meant to be kind of a continuation", adds Shepherd. This explains Cascade’s artwork: another colourful sleeve, full of fluid imagery (created once more by Akiko Nakayama). It also explains its evocative title: like Crush, one word that implies movement, beauty and pressure. Most importantly, it explains its mesmerising sound: sumptuous sonic chasms to lose yourself in again and again.
Creating the album stripped Shepherd back. Not only in terms of his set-up – "I have a studio at home with all the gear I usually use, but I wasn’t there so I had to use my laptop, doing it all on headphones", he says – but in terms of his connection to electronic music, and to his home city where his love of music first flourished. "There’s something about Manchester that keeps coming back to me, and I think it’s partly to do with its record shops", says the producer, who found himself instinctively naming tracks after local landmarks and institutions. "As a kid, my school was around the corner from the Northern Quarter so at lunchtimes, I’d run out of the school gates and skip lunch altogether to go and listen to records. I’m sure I was a total pain in the arse constantly pulling records off the shelves", he laughs, "but it was amazing. I’d be listening to Autechre at Pelican Neck, Dilla at Fat City, David Morales mixes at the Factory Records shop… It gave me a parallel education in music to what I was being taught at school". This can be found in multiple tracks on the album including lead single 'Key103' - named after "an underground Manchester radio station I’d listen to religiously" that helped expand his music sensibilities beyond the classical composers he focused on in his academic work (Shepherd studied composition at Chetham's School of Music).
Other tracks took inspiration from the dust bowl surroundings off the Californian desert, but make no mistake: Cascade is a record forged in an adolescence spent in Manchester, discovering the mind-expanding (and emotion-purging) power of electronic music in all its forms. Though devised as a continuation of Crush, Cascade nonetheless pushes Floating Points’ sound forward into new places. The nine songs here are allowed to smoulder and spark for up to eight minutes at a time, allowing for more expansive exploration of sounds and grooves than before. Almost a decade on since Elaenia, his revered debut album, the composer has discovered ways to thread his experiments outside of club music seamlessly into his music designed for the dancefloor. "I’m just constantly chasing challenges", says Shepherd, explaining how this album fits into his ever-expanding web of creative projects, of which there are many. "I always want to keep things moving and go all in on things that excite me. Whether that’s working with a 100-piece orchestra on a ballet or on a laptop on my own", Shepherd grins. Cascade is the proof – when it comes to electronic innovation and simmering tracks that stand hairs on end, Floating Points will always, always have unfinished business.
Sam Shepherd aka Floating Points has announced his new album Crush will be released on 18 October on Ninja Tune. Along with the announcement he has shared new track 'Last Bloom' along with accompanying video by Hamill Industries and announced details of a new live show with dates including London's Printworks, his biggest headline live show to date.
The best musical mavericks never sit still for long. They mutate and morph into new shapes, refusing to be boxed in. Floating Points has so many guises that it’s not easy to pin him down. There’s the composer whose 2015 debut album Elaenia was met with rave reviews – including being named Pitchfork’s ‘Best New Music’ and Resident Advisor’s ‘Album of the Year’ – and took him from dancefloors to festival stages worldwide. The curator whose record labels have brought soulful new sounds into the club, and, on his esteemed imprint Melodies International, reinstated old ones. The classicist, the disco guy that makes machine music, the digger always searching for untapped gems to re-release. And then there’s the DJ whose liberal approach to genre saw him once drop a 20-minute instrumental by spiritual saxophonist Pharoah Sanders in Berghain.
Fresh from the release earlier this year of his compilation of lambent, analogous ambient and atmospheric music for the esteemed Late Night Tales compilation series, Floating Points’ first album in four years, Crush, twists whatever you think you know about him on its head again. A tempestuous blast of electronic experimentalism whose title alludes to the pressure-cooker of the current environment we find ourselves in. As a result, Shepherd has made some of his heaviest, most propulsive tracks yet, nodding to the UK bass scene he emerged from in the late 2000s, such as the dystopian low-end bounce of previously shared striking lead single ‘LesAlpx’ (Pitchfork’s ‘Best New Track’), but there are also some of his most expressive songs on Crush: his signature melancholia is there in the album’s sublime mellower moments or in the Buchla synthesizer, whose eerie modulation haunts the album.
Whereas Elaenia was a five-year process, Crush was made during an intense five-week period, inspired by the invigorating improvisation of his shows supporting The xx in 2017. He had just finished touring with his own live ensemble, culminating in a Coachella appearance, when he suddenly became a one-man band, just him and his trusty Buchla opening up for half an hour every night. He thought what he’d come out with would "be really melodic and slow- building" to suit the mood of the headliners, but what he ended up playing was "some of the most obtuse and aggressive music I've ever made, in front of 20,000 people every night," he says. "It was liberating."
His new album feels similarly instantaneous – and vital. It’s the sound of the many sides of Floating Points finally fusing together. It draws from the "explosive" moments during his sets, the moments that usually occur when he throws together unexpected genres, for the very simple reason that he gets excited about wanting to "hear this record, really loud, now!" and then puts the needle on. It’s "just like what happens when you’re at home playing music with your friends and it's going all over the place," he says.
Today's newly announced live solo shows capture that energy too, so that the audience can see that what they’re watching isn’t just someone pressing play. Once again Shepherd has teamed up with Hamill Industries, the duo who brought their ground-breaking reactive laser technologies to his previous tours. Their vision is to create a constant dialogue between the music and the visuals. This time their visuals will zoom in on the natural world, where landscapes are responsive to the music and flowers or rainbow swirls of bubbles might move and morph to the kick of the bass drum. What you see on the screen behind Shepherd might "look like a cosmos of colour going on," says Shepherd, "but it’s actually a tiny bubble with a macro lens on it being moved by frequencies by my Buchla," which was also the process by which the LP artwork was made." It means, he adds, "putting a lot of Fairy Liquid on our tour rider".
Sam Shepherd aka Floating Points has shared a new single, 'Someone Close' which is out now via Ninja Tune.
Shepherd has also today announced that 'Someone Close' will be released on vinyl alongside the three other new tracks he's shared this year: 'Grammar', 'Vocoder' and 'Problems'. All four will be available on limited vinyl for the first time on 16 December.
'Grammar', 'Vocoder' and 'Problems' were met with widespread praise including a Best New Track from Pitchfork and a glowing review from Resident Advisor describing Shepherd as "one of electronic music's undisputed MVPs". 'Someone Close' changes track completely, something Shepherd has done effortlessly across his career, capping off a run of releases that have showcased the many strings to his bow yet still holds together seamlessly.
Following a summer of festival sets at Glastonbury, Coachella and Field Day, this Autumn/Winter Shepherd will take things back indoors. With an upcoming show on an incredible bill from The Warehouse Project he'll follow up with a marathon open-to- close set at London’s brand new 25,000 square-foot club HERE on New Year’s Day 2023.
Regardless of the confluence of events that led to this dream pairing, there’s a strong hint of clear-minded innovation to Promises. The debut collaboration LP from electronic musician Sam Shepherd aka Floating Points and legendary saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders, backed to a lavish fullness by The London Symphony Orchestra, feels like the murmurs of an entirely new language for jazz, quite distinct from either participant’s prior output — in fact, it seems to illuminate a hidden lexicon we didn’t know either artist had in the first place.
We say jazz, but Promises truly defies categorisation with its moody atmosphere and indeterminate music-like patience. The nine movements of the LP gently cradle a circular note pattern in the way of a minimalist classical piece, as a flood of synth and string drones gradually fill the empty spaces in-between. As this deep meditation progresses, Sanders recalls his adventurous past work with the Coltranes by undergoing his own inner journey, his sax flitting between conversational licks, esoteric mouth sounds and white-hot fury, bobbing against the rising tide of electronics, organs and orchestra swells.
