Floating Points – Cascade
British producer, DJ, and Pluto Records founder Floating Points approaches dance music as a composer. His dextrous, kinetic productions pack the sort of punch they do as a result of his expert craftsmanship, and since his acclaimed 2025 debut Elaenia, he’s continued to refine his skill for ever evolving, genre bending club sounds.
Cascade, his first LP since 2019’s Crush, opens with a one-two punch of nearly eight minute dancefloor scorchers – the distorted funk house of Vocoder refuses to stay boxed in, mutating through bass and garage adjacent phrases as it grows in intensity, while the minimal tech of Key103 underscores an arpeggiated synth melody that falls apart and regrows in dazzling fashion.
Floating Points is best when given the space and time to evolve an idea like he does on these longform tracks. On Ocotillo, a pointillist collage of chimes and pads is given room to expand and oscillate before being consumed by grimey industrial subbass and erratic percussion in its final act – a breathtaking journey from buoyancy into decay.
Ocotillo also demonstrates Floating Points’ preferred methodology – a fixation on a single element, usually melodic, that is stretched and pushed to its sonic limits while the other pieces of the composition are built under and around it. It’s an approach that can be found again on the alien deep house of Del Oro, between the acidic breaks of Afflecks Palace, and on the buzzing bloghouse of Fast Forward.
This allows for a focus on the somatic experience, rather than a cerebral fixation on genre or style. Cascade is a deliciously eclectic body of work that touches upon multiple threads of familiar UK club styles while never settling on any one thing. The magic is in the album’s journey from beginning to end, and in discovering all the little beginnings and endings that can be found on each track as you make your way down the waterfall to its inevitable conclusion.
Satisfyingly, Cascade ends in the opposite direction of its beginning – Ablaze melts the whole thing into a radiating pool of ambient drone notes, as Floating Points pulls everything else away and lays the soul of the album bare for us to bathe in.
