Promises

Floating Points — the Manchester-born producer and DJ Sam Shepherd, equally at home making club records for Eglo and conducting ensembles in the concert hall — has joined forces with the 80-year-old spiritual-jazz titan Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra for Promises, released this week on Luaka Bop. It is the defining electronic release of the year so far: 46 minutes across nine movements in which modern composition, jazz and electronic textural production collapse into one another until the seams are invisible.

The entire record is built around a single repeated harmonic cycle — one chord, one key, held for its whole duration. What could read as a gimmick becomes the source of its strange, meditative power: every element that enters the cycle does so as a revelation, and the album unfolds like a slow dawn rather than a journey. There is no percussion to speak of, no beat to anchor to; instead Shepherd’s electronics shimmer beneath the strings, treated pads, tape hiss and quiet organ washes providing exactly the texture his production background is uniquely suited to.

Movement 1 introduces the cycle in its purest form — a patient piano ostinato, a glowing string figure, the faint crackle of tape around the edges. Sanders’ saxophone enters almost imperceptibly, as if the instrument had always been part of the room. The brief Movement 2 through Movement 5 tilt and stretch the material, billowing clouds of reverb around single sustained notes while Sanders threads delicate, quavering phrases through the ensemble, every breath and key click audible.

The long central run is where the record truly breathes. Movement 6 and Movement 7 let the strings swell and recede in slow tides while Shepherd’s electronics — soft-focus pads, distant organ, the faint granular shimmer of his synth work — blur the line between orchestra and machine. Sanders is magnificent throughout, his tone at once monumental and frail; when he plays long, keening lines above the massed strings it sounds less like improvisation than like conversation.

Movement 8 gathers everything into a final, wordless crescendo of strings and brass, and Movement 9 lets the cycle dissolve back into silence, the piano’s closing notes hanging in the air. The LSO play with a gorgeous, almost devotional patience, and the recording lets the room breathe, every hallowed reverb tail preserved. The only drum on the record — a single, delayed boom deep in the cycle — lands like a heartbeat you didn’t know you were listening for.

Promises is a quiet, radical record: an electronic producer’s most human work, a jazz icon’s most contemporary, and a symphony orchestra at its most patient. It asks nothing but attention, and rewards it more generously than anything else released this year. Essential listening, and the collaboration of a lifetime.