Shadows, out next week, is a limited edition 2×12″ release from Floating Points.

Since emerging in 2009 with that quartet of devastating EPs and singles – ‘For You’, ‘Love Me Like This’, ‘J&W Beat’ and Vacuum – Sam Shepherd has kept busy, consistently impressing as a DJ, helming the jazz-inclined Floating Points Ensemble, and dropping a further four solo singles (all on Eglo Records).





Shadows is the best thing we’ve heard from Shepherd since Vacuum. The EP is apparently part of a collaborative project with his friend Will Hurt, who has “created a max/msp patch which studies drum machine and synthesizer activity to generate visuals in real-time” (check the video clip above). You get five lengthy tracks, including ‘Sais’ (a dub of which was released on 10″ for Record Store Day and featured in Four Tet’s recent Fabric mix CD) and ‘ARP3’, which has been floating (no pun intended) around for some time now.

Deeper and tougher than we’ve come to expect from him, and fleshed out with subtle, trippy synth arrangements, it’s superior techno music with echoes of Omar-S and Theo Parrish at their darkest and most stripped. Listen to clips of all four tracks via the Soundcloud player up top.

Tracklist:
1. Myrtle Avenue
2. Realise
3. Obfuse
4. ARP3
5. Sais