Floating Points

Five hours of vinyl and the ear of Plastic People

Floating Points sets are recognized less by a fixed BPM than by a collector's ear: spiritual jazz, house, UK garage, and techno follow one another as if the vinyl dictated the narrative. That way of DJing was tempered in the booth of Plastic People, the London club where, in the late 2000s, he held a five-year residency and learned to think about music through an unforgiving sound system.

Eglo, Elaenia and the club orchestra

Raised in Manchester, he trained on the piano at Chetham's School of Music and later completed a PhD in neuroscience and epigenetics at University College London, all while continuing to release music. In 2008 he began releasing under this name; shortly after, he co-founded Eglo Records with Alexander Nut and released the Vacuum EP, as well as 12-inch records that Gilles Peterson programmed on the BBC. The Pluto Records label and the album Elaenia (2015)—Resident Advisor's Album of the Year—took him from underground dance floors to festivals, with an eleven-piece live band and sold-out nights at Islington Assembly Hall and Electric Brixton. The sixteen-piece Floating Points Ensemble had already won the award for best Maida Vale session on BBC Radio 1. Kuiper (2016) and Reflections: Mojave Desert (2017) expanded that pulse toward the orchestral and cinematic; in 2017 he supported The xx and played at Coachella.

Promises, Pandora and the return to Cascade

Crush (2019, Ninja Tune) tightened the Buchla synthesizer and UK bass into a denser record, and he contributed a mix to the Late Night Tales series. In 2021, Promises, composed with Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra for Luaka Bop, was nominated for the Mercury Prize, reached number 6 on the official UK chart and number 1 on the vinyl chart, and TIME named it album of the year. After Sanders' death, a unique concert at the Hollywood Bowl closed the cycle. In 2024 he premiered Mere Mortals, his first ballet score, with the San Francisco Ballet and Hamill Industries; the recording was released in 2026 on Deutsche Grammophon. Cascade, also in 2024, returned the project to the dance floor with tracks like Key103 and Afflecks Palace, anchored in Manchester, and reached number 1 on the UK dance album chart. In 2025, alongside Kamasi Washington and Bonobo, he scored the soundtrack for the series Lazarus. Today he moves between the orchestra, the club, and DJ marathons—five hours for Boiler Room in New York—without letting go of the thread that connects vinyl, jazz, and the machine.