Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.How to follow an album acclaimed as among the decade’s best, which also marked the last recording by a jazz eminence who died the year after its release? That’s the challenge facing Floating Points after 2021’s Promises, a superlative work featuring the final appearance by saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, torchbearer for spiritual jazz. Cascade is the British electronic musician’s return to action. Its music aims for a different type of heightened state, one involving muscle, sinew, motor neurons, energy and dopamine — in short, the dance floor.“Vocoder (Club Mix)” sets out the album’s stall. A scratchy, tintinnabulating beat builds into a warmer and more dynamic set of sounds as though leading us to where the action is at. “Key103” is minimal techno with a gripping contrast between cleanly defined tones and distortion. It is named after a radio station that the producer, aka Sam Shepherd, listened to while growing up in Manchester in the 1990s.“Afflecks Palace”, which refers to a famous subcultural emporium in the city, is an acid-house stormer in the spirit of another Mancunian landmark, the Haçienda. The mad squiggle of laser effects that erupts towards the end is set alongside a dissonant keyboard breakdown that seems to have arrived unsteadily from a free-jazz improv session. Even when pressing down hardest on the accelerator, Shepherd doesn’t abandon the musical breadth that led him to make Promises with Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra.Vocals make fleeting and inconsistent appearances, like the abbreviated snatch of singing that turns up sporadically in “Del Oro”. This is the only aspect of the album that seems not to have been worked out fully. The rest is lifted by a highly attuned sense of balance and timing. Build-ups, peaks and drops are used with unerring skill. Different resonances and pitches provide a satisfying array of acoustic stimuli. In keeping with the neuroscience PhD that Shepherd did before becoming a DJ and producer, you can picture the various parts of the brain lighting up as his dance music hits its stride, at once cerebral and kinetic.★★★★☆ ‘Cascade’ is released by Ninja Tune
