It was the arrival of a Studer A80 master recorder at the front door of Sam Shepherd – otherwise known as Floating Points – that caused him to begin building the studio that led to the creation of his debut album, Elaenia (due out via Pluto in the UK and Luaka Bop in the US on 6 November). After a slight miscalculation meant that he could not physically get the thing inside his home, what happened next can only be described as a beautiful example of the butterfly effect. Breaking away from making electronic music on his laptop, the DJ, producer and composer spent the next five years engineering Elaenia, all the while d-jing in cities across the globe and working towards his PhD in neuroscience. An incredibly special album that draws inspiration from classical, jazz, electronic music, soul and even Brazilian popular music, Elaenia – named after the bird of the same name – is the epitome of the forward-thinking Floating Points vision in 2015.

Like his contemporaries and good friends Caribou and Four Tet, Shepherd has nurtured the Floating Points name into one renowned for ambitious and forward-thinking DJ sets, having performed all over the world at events and clubs such as Output NYC, Trouw, Sonar, Unit Tokyo, Panorama Bar and, of course, Nuits Sonores (which lent its name to his seminal track from summer 2014); as well as the much-missed Plastic People, where he held his monthly residency for five years. His love for digging through recordings from around the world is just as huge as the venues themselves – Shepherd has an ear for everything from Brazilian legends such as Jose Mauro, Gal Costa and Hareton Salvagnini right through to the 1970’s Embryo Records band Air. Overall, influences on Elaenia run wide and deep and are charmingly eclectic – Shepherd names Laughing Stock by Talk Talk as a critical influence in the making of the record, for example, as well as the leftfield leanings of Circles by William S. Fischer.