New Music From Floating Points and Turnstile

In April of this year, Sam Shepherd, aka Floating Points, was in San Francisco for 11 performances of his piece for the San Francisco Ballet, Mere Mortals. I caught one of the shows and it was amazing, both musically and visually. Sam was in the pit with his Buchla modular synthesizer, joining a 70-piece orchestra playing live as 40 dancers performed on stage with additional visuals and staging. It was a huge production in every sense of the word, and a very unique piece of music. I had a chance to sit down and chat with Sam towards the end of the run, and that interview is in the next issue of Tape Op that we are sending to the printers this week. The music was also recorded at Lucasfilms’ Skywalker Ranch, and was released this week on Deutsche Grammophon. You’ll need to wait a few weeks for our conversation with Sam about the ballet, working with Pharoah Sanders, and his pHD in neurosciences, but you can hear Mere Mortals now, so check it out. 

Sam’s a busy guy and he also contributed a track to the very cool Turnstile remix LP, Never Enough:Versions. Never Enough was my #1 record in 2025, and this remix LP is pretty great. Besides the Floating Points track, there are versions of Never Enough tracks by Porches, Blood Orange, Dan Deacon, Elton John (!), Panda Bear [Tape Op #156], Chanel Beads, Shabaka, Julien Baker [#125],  A. G. Cook, OKLou, and many other artists. This is a very eclectic and diverse batch of tracks, and a really fun listen that moves from heavy, to folk, to jazz, to EDM, and a lot of places in between. Hats off to Turnstile for both putting together and inspiring such a great group of artists and collection of recordings. If you missed Never Enough, you can start here or start with the original LP, either way these LPs showcase how good the songwriting is on this group of songs.