We’re ending the year with one of our personal favorites
We couldn't let the year finish without playing this incredible record that has been called album of the year by so many collectors, and it’s meant to be heard all the way through in one sitting. Join us once again at Saint Joaquin for natural wine and a dedicated listening session featuring an all-star collaboration.
Promises is a new nine-piece movement between American free jazz legend Pharoah Sanders, British electronic musician and composer Floating Points (Sam Shepherd), and the London Symphony Orchestra. We had anticipated this album so much in part because it’s Pharoah’s first studio recording in over a decade. Also, Floating Points’ electronic productions have always found their way into our DJ crates over the years. We happened to be at the Julie Mehretu exposition in LA when the album was announced, and we held off from listening to it until our vinyl preorder showed up in the mail.
Shepherd shines on the album’s mix, which is impeccable. The production in general is a minor miracle of technology: The LSO’s players recorded their parts remotely during the pandemic, using over one hundred mics simultaneously. The clarity and balance are remarkable and the marvel of Promises is its expansive intimacy. The materiality of the thing is there to theorize, if you’re into that; it’s impossible to disregard the concrete reality of the recording process under 2020’s viral conditions, and easy to let the music’s quiet force symbolize that year’s desperate sense of isolation and longing.
Mehretu’s work was a major inspiration for Floating Points during the making of Promises, with the musician saying “I wanted to perpetuate this idea of being centered in the middle of the painting with its details swirling around you, of being in the middle of this perfect storm which only slowly reveals itself.”
Come early and stay late to chat about the records and see what we have coming up next!
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