Eyesdown (Floating Points remix) // Bonobo // (ninja tune)

My blog hasn't been for going all that long but already I have devoted an inordinate amount of words toward Floating Points, because, honestly, he's my favourite thing in music at the moment. His remix of Bonobo's Eyesdown is, unbelievably, possibly his best tune to date.

The melancholic mood evoked by the sullen female vocals and the jittery synth is erily beautiful and immediately striking, unlike some of his other tracks that are more slow-burning. Still, he doesn't lose any of the subtlety that his prior tracks exploited to create hypnotic and dynamic tracks despite their simplicity. FP also creates huge space in the track for the wistful vocals and synth to play about in; it seems as though Sam Shephard is (deservedly) becoming more confident in his production.

Hear the track here:

Bonobo - 'Eyesdown' (Floating Points Remix) by Ninja Tune

Sing (Floating Points Remix) // Four Tet // (domino)

Four Tet's previous single had an excellent remix as the B-side (by Joy Orbison, no less) , and his latest release, Sing, is no different. Floating Points completely dismantles the song, extracting the ambience of Kieran Hebdens work and using it to bookend a frantic thumping that makes up the body long (nearly 14 minutes-long!) remix. Being Floating Points, of course, the isn't as simple as that. The main riff expands from a beat to a short, sharp synth, and glides about samples from the original song, interspaced with distant wistling noises. A very calming, ethereal atmosphere is evoked because of all this, which is a far cry from the rest of his back-catelogue. For only one moment in the duration of the song that it sounds anything like Floating Points is at the 10 minute mark, but the vast majority of the time it sounds like someone comletely different, which is particularly impressive as he has already spanned so many sounds in his previous work. The remix is subtle in its elegance, so the 14 minutes passes in a breeze.

On a side note, I really don't like Four Tet's music. On paper it has all the elements I like, but something about the way he constructs melodies around his rythms really annoys me, yet I can't quite put my finger on what exactly it is. Strange, since the remix's of his songs are nothing but gold.

Sing(le) released 15 March.

Sing (Floating Points Remix) (10 minutes edit) // Four Tet :



Love Cry (Joy Orbison Remix) // Four Tet:



myspace.com/floatingpoints
myspace.com/fourtetkieranhebden
myspace.com/joyorbison

Peoples Potential // Floating Points // (eglo)

Classicly-trained Flotaing Points has flirted with all the scenes in Londons underground dance scene - a bit of funky, a byte of garage (puns definitely intended) in his wonderfully sprawling dance tracks. Peoples Potential is possibly his most housey track to date, but that means little as his painstakingly crafted tracks are still vastly different to anything anyone else is producing.

Sam Shepherd (the real name of Floating Points) has a unique method of constructing dance music, carefully his melodies float in and out of the listeners attention, never completey overpowering or disappearing altogether. One line is brought to the foreground while others mingle in the background, vying to be brought back to be the centre of attention, by which Floating Points can build and release multiple times through his tracks, each time subltly different from the last. An insistent synth riff comes first, leading onto a drone that develops into a flickering noise which demands urgency. The way the riffs are contantly changing makes the track organic, and this feeling is only heightened by the eratic jazz piano that appears out of nowhere halfway through the track, snakes around the synth line, dances with it, but never overpowers it. Maybe not quite as good as some of his other tracks, especially like K & G Beat, but this track certainly shows how Shepherd refuses to be confined to one particular scene, and still amazing in its own right.

Peoples Potential // Floating Points:



K & G Beat (his best track to date):



myspace.com/floatingpoints