Floating Points - Crush

October 18, 2019 - Ninja Tune

Deeply brooding and irate is the neuroscientist Sam Shepherd better known as Floating Points. Immersed in broadcasts of the impossible Brexit, a dying planet, dying people, dying wildlife, Sam Shepherd found himself communicating his anger and frustration into his latest album Crush. 

The tracks make use of the disjointed nature of the world’s talking heads, taking beautiful orchestral strings and symphonic arrangements and chopping them up, processing them through synth after synth, as to reflect 

Shepherds’ relationship with news media, with public figureheads like Michael Gove that for whatever nonsensical reason thinks we need fewer experts on the scene for making big global decisions. 

Although bound together by the frustrations Shepherd and many of us have undergone during disempowering media storms and general catastrophe, Crush doesn’t lean into any particular narrative. Rather, the album is a built as a routine impacted—sprawling from track one ‘Falaise,’ which builds its musings off the historic city, to ‘Sea-Watch’ inspired by the great humanitarian Carole Rackete, and concluding with ‘Apoptose’ which refers the healthy death of a cell. Thus, Crush provides a pastoral of sorts, a therapeutic room, busy work full of sympathetic nods and reflections. ⛰️