Floating Points, Last Bloom
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>A delicately beautiful amalgam of skittery modular beats and runaway synth arpeggios, at first listen Floating Points’ Last Bloom seems like a relatively structureless wander through an experimental soundscape without much actual theory involved. But if you know anything about Sam Shepherd, the driving force behind FP, you’ll realise that a lack of theory knowledge is anything but the case.
What we have here, then, is one of those occasions where a lot of effort has been put into making a minimalist end product that on the surface appears abstract in nature, but when you dive deep, a very well-thought out structure does become apparent. Shepherd’s random tweaking of the envelopes and pattern programming of the modular synth providing the drum track only serves to reinforce the resulting feeling of randomness as the track progresses. Key-wise, the music doesn’t appear to be completely in concert, which made it entertaining for us to work out the key that it’s in. After playing around with the tuning a little, we settled on a base key of C minor, although the recorded version presented around 35 cents sharper than that overall.