Floating Points — Music, Neuroscience & Time
Floating Points — Music, Neuroscience & Time
Sam Shepherd — Floating Points — is a neuroscientist who makes music. The two pursuits are not separate in his practice. He is interested, at a molecular level, in how sound affects the brain, in what happens in the body when music moves through it. His electronic compositions are precise the way scientific inquiry is precise: nothing is there by accident.
Promises, the 2021 collaboration with Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra, is one of the most extraordinary pieces of music made in the last decade. A single nine-movement work, 46 minutes long, it operates at the pace of the tide — vast, patient, unhurried. Sanders's saxophone enters and exits like weather. The strings move like light through water. You do not listen to this album. You inhabit it.
The wine connection is about time. About patience. About the moment a thing becomes itself — the point in a wine's life, or a composition's development, when the elements align and something arrives that was always latent in the material. Great aged wine does what Promises does: it asks you to slow down, to stay with it, to notice the thing that only reveals itself if you don't rush it.
The conversation The Léger Guide wants: what does neuroscience tell us about why we love what we love? What is the relationship between scientific understanding and aesthetic experience — does knowing how music affects the brain change how it feels? And what does patience produce in art that urgency cannot?
I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.
The Léger Guide - June 3, 2024
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The Léger Guide - June 3, 2024
Aliquam ut porttitor leo a diam sollicitudin tempor id. Sit amet commodo nulla facilisi nullam vehicula ipsum a arcu. Placerat orci nulla pellentesque dignissim enim sit amet venenatis urna.
The Léger Guide - June 3, 2024
Aliquam ut porttitor leo a diam sollicitudin tempor id. Sit amet commodo nulla facilisi nullam vehicula ipsum a arcu.
The Léger Guide - June 3, 2024
Aliquam ut porttitor leo a diam sollicitudin tempor id.
The Léger Guide - June 3, 2024
Aliquam ut porttitor leo a diam sollicitudin tempor id. Sit amet commodo nulla facilisi nullam vehicula ipsum a arcu. Placerat orci nulla pellentesque dignissim enim sit amet venenatis urna.
The Léger Guide - June 3, 2024
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The Léger Guide - June 3, 2024