Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra - Promises

Luaka Bop

Promises is the collaborative efforts of Manchester based Electronic artist Floating Points, American Jazz legend Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra. It ties in progressive electronic soundscapes with spiritual jazz's free of form flow, and is like nothing you're going to find this year.

Promises is one of those weird projects where you see the names of the collaborators and think "oh shit, that would be amazing" then the thought disappears off into obscurity never to be brought back again. But the catch is that this project lives up to the hype in your head. I haven't heard anything close to this in its showcase of sublime simplicity - a word that is likely to crop up again and again. It's going to be used about as much as the motif that runs through the records veins.

The ebb and flow of the music is meticulous. It has a sentient quality to it, like it's breathing the material from deep within itself. It's the kind of project that comes through the musicians that produced it rather than from them. As if they're mediums for the music. The nine 'movements', seamless from one to the other, join together to create one windswept piece. The recurring motif that runs through the record is as beautiful a use of repetition as you're going to find. It is quite simply simplicity brought to splendor. Harnessing simplicity is the key to Promises - the backbone of the project. Any more active and the record loses its special touch. You'll find moments of pure solace within Promises walls, if you could call them walls - they're more like metaphysical agreements.

Tranquil to say the very least. Peace of mind in performance form.