WORDS: Ben Verghese
PHOTOGRAPHY: Andrew Cotterill

Splicing genes by day, beats by nights, Floating Points is a scientist of sound, molecularly breaking it down.

Riding a meteoric wave through the underground scene, his hit song ‘Love Me Like This’ has accumulated tens of thousands of hits via various online portals. The response at London hotspots Deviation and Nonsense was unlike any other: crowds went wild, reloads were demanded, crowds went wild again. Initially available as a free download, it later got reworked with live parts and made available on vinyl via R2 Records, as it continues to supercharge dancefloors.

Juggling his musical making with a PhD in Molecular Genetics —specifically an interest in the neuroscience of pain at a molecular level — Sam has developed a distinct, signature sound using component parts in ways that go beyond the instruction manual: he has previously captured sounds as seemingly drab as a toilet seat or kitchen door and reconfigured them into a bass or snare drum! Another factor in his distinctive sound is the way Floating Points songs tend to move around a central tone or tonic. “Certain aspects of harmony at the moment really get to me.” he expains “Especially a lot of altered stuff, a lot of Modal stuff. And the French Impressionists, Debussy, Ravel, Fauré, Duruflé, Les Six, but most  importantly Messiaen. Messiaen is every day, the most important to me.”

French choral traditions aren’t a typical muse for electronic musicians, yet Sam’s schooling [at Chetham's School of Music] grounded him in some epic Chamber compositions. Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time) is treasured by Sam, a work he “doesn’t listen to lightly”. Penned in 1940-41 when Messiaen was a prisoner of war, the piece premiered to 400 POWs and guards, prompting its composer to later say “Never was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension”. Sam explains the structure in the opening movement (‘Liturgie de cristal’) “It’s all loops! He has a rhythmical loop, and a harmonic loop on the piano; seventeen rhythms and twenty-nine harmonies. At the end, it stops in its tracks, gazing into eternity”.

Such insight casts light on the remarkable rhythmic and harmonic patterns which frequent Floating Points music. “I turned to writing dance music because it’s quite immediate, you can sit at your PC, then a week later play it in a club. Writing Classical music is hard! It’s slow, you can’t always find an orchestra!”

Read about the Floating Points Ensemble and all other things eglo,  including talk with Alex Nut, FunkinEven, Fatima and Shuanise, in SHOOK 006.

myspace.com/floatingpoints

soundcloud.com/floatingpoints