How Floating Points Modernizes the Myth of Pandora for Mere Mortals

16 hours ago

4 min read

The latest Boards of Canada record, Inferno, made a pretty big splash on its release earlier this year. The album made the rounds beyond Boards of Canada's own cult following, getting rave reviews from sites like Clash (9/10), Pitchfork (8.6/10), and Uncut (9/10). The album also fared well on review aggregators like Album of the Year and RateYourMusic.

Even more recently, Sam Shepard of Floating Points teamed up with the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra for the classical/electronic fusion Mere Mortals. Unfortunately I can't say that this album reached anywhere near the hype of Inferno even when in my opinion it can be just as impactful and effective.

What the two albums do share however (besides coming from two of the best electronic music projects of the 21st century) is a similar conceptual basis: that of myths and epic poetry. Inferno, if the name wasn't a give away, is loosely inspired by the famous first cantica of Dante's Divine Comedy. And Mere Mortals is a dramatic concept album that reimagines the Greek myth of Pandora for modern concerns.

Despite both albums being almost primarily (or entirely) instrumental, they each capture the dramatic arcs of the stories they are adapting. On Tuesday I looked at Inferno, and you can find a link to that article at the bottom of this page. Today I will talk about how Floating Points adapts Pandora's story into climactic orchestral-meets-electro fusion.

Mere Mortals

Floating Points, aka Sam Shepard, composed Mere Mortals to accompany ballet performances with the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra, and accordingly it doesn't have even the limited sampled lyrics of Boards of Canada's Inferno. However, it is also much more straightforward as an adaptation. Where Inferno was more of a deep, thematic allusion to Dante, Mere Mortals seeks to actually embody the tragic and apocalyptic story of Pandora through ballet performance and music, bringing its ideas of released pain and evil into the modern day.

Mere Mortals uses the oscillation between silence and chaos as an incredibly powerful tool to evoke the ideas of Pandora's unleashed entropy. The first track builds extremely slowly: sharp violins plateau across the slow 5-minute "Movement 1 - Fire" (referring to Prometheus's illegal gift of fire to humanity). It eventually crescendos into a rapid gunfire of programmed drums in "Movement 3 - Rage of the Gods". Like an auditory representation of all the chaos and evil stored in Pandora's pithos, "Movement 3" uses dissonant strings and polyrhythmic beats to unnerve and offput the listener.

These incredibly thunderous and dizzying rhythms continue in another form, with the tom-heavy, nearly tribal beats of "Movement 5 - Pandora's Creation". Then that pendulum of dynamics swings again on "Movement 6 - Pandora's Theme", slowing and giving way to sickly sweet violins swirling and rising up in octaves in an ascension to the heavens. This cyclic nature also calls to mind Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians or Philip Glass' Glassworks. These works similarly use the repetition of musical ideas to create a baseline for the composition to rest on and play with.

This pattern continues all throughout the record, with chaotic electronic synths and Stravinsky-inspired acoustic dissonance working together to create the character of Pandora's fraught story and the apocalyptic ending that comes when her pithos is opened. That moment comes during "Movement 11 - Opening of the Box" where the transition from serenity to visceral loudness is repeated again and again with various stabs of furious horns and strings quieting for just a few moments before they return.

The way that Floating Points utilizes silence in this composition can be incredibly powerful in other ways as well. At the very end of "Movement 11" the song builds to another climax that is cut off right at the moment of anticipation, leading into the desperate and deliberately messy violin solo in "Movement 12 - A Plea". These varied uses of silence, both as a way of setting the tone (as in the first movement), as well as a way of disrupting the listener's expectations (as in "Movement 11"), are highly tactile and dynamic, making the album come alive.

Without the experience of having seen the ballet performance it's a little more difficult to decode the narrative and emotional arc of the album. However, statements by the choreographer Aszure Barton have specified that the performance seeks to place Artificial Intelligence in the place of the horrid sickness, death, and suffering released by Pandora's curiosity. An apt comparison for something that once it is unleashed, can never be contained.

This reimagining came from a desire to analyse how the myths of Pandora and Prometheus have been retranslated and readapted over the centuries and millennia. Sam Shepard echoed this idea, saying "I diverted my attention towards Pandora, then got sucked into this world of etymological bias that exists within translation of these ancient texts." Shepard referred to the 16th century translation most famous for mistranslating Pandora's pithos into a 'box': “It took her positive attributes and objectified them, took her negative attributes and moralised them, [...] It made Pandora this evil temptress. I'm interested in the idea that our understanding of these stories is morphing through time, through all these different lenses, and so the music I wrote for this ballet tried to pin the themes on these ideas.”

Paul Taylor - Web Content Director