Floating Points: Braindance

After the resounding success of last year’s Elaenia, Sam Shepherd has taken its blend of jazz and electronica onto the live circuit, performing that delicately detailed music with the gusto expected of a main stage headliner. Some songs are better suited for the transition than others—Thin Air wouldn’t work so well as Peroration Six, for instance—but Elaenia’s patient pacing makes for useful performative theatrics. Kupier, the first new material after Elaenia, seems to play directly into this dynamic.
With one new song and a second rendition of album highlight For Mamish, the EP quickly forgets about Floating Points the DJ or studio producer. And it’s not just the sizable runtimes (18 and 14 minutes) that betray Kupier’s intentions—the title track’s extended slow build and its counterpart’s groovy murmuring might as well be an ad for Floating Points’s next show.