- Sam Shepherd, as Floating Points, put out one of last year’s capital-A Albums in Elaenia, and it got called all the things you hear supposedly important albums being called. Long-awaited, highly anticipated, groundbreaking, Best New Music. And it was, refreshingly, all of those things.

From the opening moments of Nespole, which to me sound unlike any music ever, to the deal-sealing chaos of its closer Peroration Six, Elaenia defies listeners with the kind of cantankerous smirk on its sleeve that only life as a DJ in London will be able to permanently embroider you with. It’s an enormous, shape-shifting piece of got-damn magic.

So in all honesty, I’m still fairly hungover from it. I still listen to it – like a lot. More than once a day, sometimes. I was slightly hesitant to even approach its follow-up, the Kuiper EP. At surface level, it’s just as unapproachable as its predecessor; it consists of two roundabout fifteen-minute tracks and has the same brand of coldly foreign cover art. But happily, it’s more like a good sequel than a reboot that’s so bad it kind of makes you hate the original, as well as yourself for even liking the original.

Kuiper is also just as easy to get into as Elaenia. The trick with both of them is you just have to let them tickle you in their own way. Once you get past the ominous introduction of Kuiper (the song), its eighteen minutes seem to just drift by like you’re in a vacuum. A live favourite out of the Floating Points live set, it’s lovingly captured here in what feels like a very live, very jammy way – but the production never limits the sound to that live kind of feel.

Shepherd looms large over the mix and penetrates it with that special kind of intense electronic producer attention to detail – notice what in the hell he’s doing to the drums around the nine-minute mark. The whole thing’s unrelentingly expansive and absolutely absorbing, never slipping into some element of dull repetition, never indulging itself by going in a direction it didn’t need to. It’s remarkable how controlled it is.

The vaguely Steve Reichian rhythmic patterns that follow in For Marmish Pt. II bounce around like puffy balls of sheer buttery bliss. But after its first half, it undergoes this remarkable process, totally audible by the way, where it distills all its disparate elements into a singular, infinite band of haunted ambience, sustained and suspended in mid-air like some kind of spectacle that only happens every thousand years. It’s just breathtaking.

Overall, Kuiper ups the jazz factor that was already quite pronounced on Elaenia. It’s basically an extrapolation. But I won’t do any further disservice to this excellent EP by harping on about the monument everyone else is going to judge it against as well. Kuiper stands well and truly on its own as another kind of majestic beast that balls together jazz, electronica, freakout jams and liberated experimentation with some of the most immaculate contemporary production you’re going to hear.

- Joe Saxby.