Accompanied by the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra, the English prodigy who emerged from the electro scene, Sam Shepherd, writes his first ballet around Pandora, another testament to a talent unlike any other.
With British Sam Shepherd, any binary or reductive approach quickly proves ill-suited. We’re talking about a neuroscience engineer who watched club culture reshape his life, a DJ and producer who has collaborated with a symphony orchestra and the legendary jazzman Pharoah Sanders on a single album. In roughly two decades, Floating Points has shown—through his projects or the labels he has launched—a striking curiosity that carries him from the dancefloor to the conservatories of so-called “savants’” music. After Cascade (2024) on the English electronic label Ninja Tune, he now finds a home with the German classical giant Deutsche Grammophon… always this taste for the long arc across genres.
This time, Sam Shepherd offers a ballet he composed for the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra, built around the Greek myth of Pandora’s box—the container that, once opened, pours miseries onto the Earth. Created in January 2024 but re-recorded, Falling to Earth sees orchestral and synthetic timbres fuse and collide in a sonic dance that is intricate yet consistently evocative of eternal threats. In Rage of Gods, the strings and brass conjure a war-torn landscape, propelled by percussion in a tempo reminiscent of a machine gun. There are overt influences (the Steve Reich of Music for 18 Musicians), taut electronic rhythms in the diptych Gift from the Gods–Falling To Earth, and intimate moments too, such as Her Gift with harpist Miriam Adefris.
Mere Mortals (Deutsche Grammophon/Universal). Out on August 28.
