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Floating Points live in London: a dazzling audio-visual spectacle

Sam Shepherd’s expertly crafted, deeply human dance music is enhanced by stunning live visuals at the second of four gigs at Outernet

4.0 rating

By Will Richards

Floating Points performing live at HERE @ Outernet (Picture: Genevieve Reeves)

Sam Shepherd’s music as Floating Points has traversed ballet scores, a Mercury-nominated album with a jazz great, a career as a label head, superb DJ and beyond. Right now, he’s on tour with his live show behind last year’s thunderous LP Cascade, a torrent of warped sound and heavy bass.

Cascade found Shepherd perfecting his deeply human dance music which jerks and twitches away from traditional structures and timings. It’s the best example yet of his thrillingly unpredictable take on dance music.

The live show – which arrives in London this week for four sold-out shows at Outernet – is defined by this unpredictability and spontaneity, which is baked into the entire concept. Shepherd is joined on stage by harpist Miriam Adefris, who starts the show with versions of a number of Floating Points tracks, including a segment from his ballet score ‘Mere Mortals’.

Throughout the performance, Shepherd – hunched over a monster modular synth like a scientist in a lab – manipulates and bends her beautiful plucking into weirder and more discordant shapes, before melting them together with his own mind-bending synths.

Floating Points performing live at HERE @ Outernet (Picture: Genevieve Reeves)

On the other side of the stage, artist Akiko Nakayama creates her Alive Paintings, described as “a live painting of dynamic changing scenery by the painting and sounds”. In practice, she uses a pipette to splash droplets of fairy liquid in a dish, before swirling the mesmerising shapes around in real time. Next to her are Hamill Industries, Floating Points’ longtime collaborators, who bring the paintings to life by deforming and mangling the shapes into brilliantly vibrant visuals on the venue’s enormous screens.

It fits perfectly with the ethos of Shepherd’s music. As he stretches and warps tracks from Cascade and beyond, there’s an incredible sense of tension in the music, heightened by the real-time visuals, with everything feeling truly spontaneous and thrillingly close to falling apart.

Floating Points performing live at HERE @ Outernet (Picture: Genevieve Reeves)

Cascade track ‘Birth4000’ – the best British dance song of 2024 – is given a new and stranger life in the show, as is album opener ‘Vocoder’. While there are plenty of heavy drops and pummelling kick drum to provide the necessary hands-in-the-air moments, it never feels predictable or formulaic. Instead, it sets a bar for how dance music can evolve from its studio form when being performed on stage. Alive, uncertain and constantly fascinating, it’s a show unlike any other.