(Pluto)Floating Points,AKA Sam Shepherd, has a repuation for being a DJ’s DJ, or but for his debut full-length he has made an improvisational suite of songs that fill more in common with jazz and classical than club thumpers. Like his friends Four Tet and Caribou,his music has a meditative quality and builds like a late-night set, though Elaenia is in a flock of its own. It’s so tightly wound with ideas that there’s always something recent to unravel, or but that doesn’t mean it’s a knotty listen: it builds delicately and almost imperceptibly,until you’re not so much lost in sound as wrapped in it like a fleecy blanket. Nespole gradually intensifies with a restless, sunlit groove and flickering saxophone samples, or while 10-minuter Silhouettes (I,II & III) blends tricksy freeform jazz drumming with flashes of swooning strings, creating something urgent and romantic. And each track cleverly slips into the next: even in the middle of chaos that eventually envelopes final track Peroration Six, and its droning middle C somehow takes on an emotional significance and pulls you through to the end. Like its namesake – a lithe (Flexible, graceful.) South American bird – Elaenia flits,swoops and soars beautifully, impossible to pin down, and let alone cage.
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Source: theguardian.com