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Floating Points – aka Sam Shepherd – doesn’t do things by halves.
People coming to his (sold out) gig at Outernet were perhaps expecting some light techno to blast them out of the January blues. What they got was a multi-medium extravaganza involving a harpist, a visual artist creating paintings live on stage and a two-hour set whipped up on the spot using an array of modular synths.
More fool us for expecting anything different from an artist whose DJ’ing abilities are as revered as his nose for jazz – and who, indeed, has a PhD in neuroscience to boot.
This is a man who has made a career out of his versatility, as well as his ability to create complex music on the fly. His mini-residence comes hot on the heels of his most recent album, Cascade: a tribute to hazy nights on the dancefloor, and a welcome change from the chaotic noise of his previous album Crush. And the dancefloor element was well and truly present here.
First, though, we had the harp. For an act that began at 9pm – with no warm-up – putting harpist Miriam Adefris on stage to take us through a melodic rendition of some of Floating Points’ hits (including Birth and a excerpt from his ballet, Mere Mortals) was a ballsy move. Did it pay off? For the first five minutes, yes. Then the crowd got restless.
Fortunately, Shepherd was on hand shortly after to warp the sounds into something infinitely gnarlier and more interesting. He’s an old hand at making music live these days, but it never fails to be impressive, especially when the camera panned over his decks and displayed the equipment arrayed on stage: a rainbow looping of wires and incomprehensible buttons.
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With Shepherd at the helm, we were led through a string of some of his biggest recent hits, each of which were greeted with cheers by the crowd. There was Birth4000 and Anasickmodular, as well as Vocoder: all of which were transformed into something slightly strange and unknowable (and possibly just a little bit alien invasion) by the liberal use of the Therevox.
With him on stage was visual artist Akiko Nakayama, with whom he’s collaborated before and who arguably stole the entire show. With a camera primed above what looked like an on-stage laboratory, she dripped sparkling ink into water, swirled paint through black space and made bubbles dance to the beat. The result (transferred through VFX artists Hamill Industries, also on stage) became mesmerising on Outernet’s massive on-stage screens: when the beat dropped and the screens exploded with colour, the mood became euphoric.
Just as things were in full swing, though, disaster – back came the harp. As an artistic statement, yep, it worked, but as part of a live music gig, it very effectively sapped all momentum from the night.
Pinging from that (quiet enough to hear the crowd talking) to the closing track of Afflecks Palace, which morphed into pure, gnarled Aphex Twin electronica, was enough to give anybody whiplash and put the cap on an ambitious, if uneven, night.
But that’s Floating Points all over: there’s nobody better to watch taking those big swings. Even when he misses, the end result is never anything less than compelling.
Outernet, on Friday 24; tickets at dice.fm