FLOATING POINTS - Mere Mortals

Sam Shepherd's versatility is hardly news at this point, nor is his constant drive to push the Floating Points brand beyond the confines of any single genre. Electronic music, certainly, but bent into different shapes and paired with the unexpected. The most striking example of this was his collaboration with a jazz giant like Pharoah Sanders on the acclaimed "Promises". So it's no shock to find him now tackling his first full ballet score, composed in collaboration with the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra.

"Mere Mortals" revisits the myth of Pandora, and its album version falls in line with the classical/electronic hybrids promoted by Deutsche Grammophon, though in this case it isn't a reworking. When the company's director Tamara Rojo asked for a single track, Shepherd responded by offering up an entire work instead. Orchestral writing and electronics are the foundations here, but it should be said right away that the scales tip heavily toward the former. That's what makes it compelling, but it's also the weak link in the whole design.

The writing is impactful, the arrangements carefully crafted. The strings and horns work at their best, building dizzying crescendos, cosmic openings, solemn progressions. But it's in the blending with glitch textures and insistent synthetic pulses that the sound reaches its peaks ("Rage Of The Gods", "Falling To Earth"), turning into an engrossing mass. A meeting of divergent traits that also shows up in the overall structure, when the intimacy sketched by the harp/Therevox ET 4.3 dialogue on "Her Gift" gives way to the restless whirl of "Opening Of The Jar".

This is a quality production, conceived to come fully alive on stage, yet one that, all things considered, still manages to work and win you over in its transposition to record, far removed from live performance. Perhaps it needed to dare a little more.

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09/10/2026