Floating Points

This album Mere Mortals is composer-producer Floating Points’s (Sam Shepherd) first full-length ballet score. Shepherd, who is known for mesmeric live sets that often combine acoustic and electronic instruments, wrote the work in response to a commission from Tamara Rojo, Artistic Director of San Francisco Ballet.   Inspired by the myth of Pandora and laced with metatextual poetry, Mere Mortals was premiered at San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House in January 2024, directed by Rojo, with chor…

* Repress, on color vinyl* Apparently it's been over a decade since avant jazz deity Pharoah Sanders recorded any new music, it took Sam Shephard aka Floating Points to coax the 80 year old out of near-retirement. Anyone familiar with Sanders' work will know how life-affirming his music can be, from his early work with John Coltrane, through 1967's mind-altering "Tauhid" to his spiritual pairing with Alice Coltrane on "Journey in Satchidananda". Here, he takes a more restrained role, offering bu…