Floating Shrine - Connecting (2024)

Warm organic arrangements shatter icy electronic chatter to form clear sonic artworks.

Decaying Spheres proudly welcome back Floating Shrine to build on his impressive debut with a release inspired by trips to Japan and fuelled by a talent in building textured soundscapes.

Each limb of Connecting follows a methodology that finds glitchy textures confer and seek a place of comfort alongside beautifully played piano and swelling pads. In doing so, Floating Shrine creates short voyages that crackle with an icy futurism while flourishing as graceful, classically-coded movements.

Opener to the LP, Empty (feat. Wayd), offers a melancholy piano sequence before forceful notes rush forward in a moment of ecstasy, lined by crisp jumbles of feedback, like the last epiphanic moments of an android’s life before they are decommissioned forever. The experience is dynamic, with Floating Shrine being unafraid to send fiery comets of sound past the listener, then mixing them with the enlivening patter of trickling water.

The artist displays a striking mastery of this innovative style as electronic elements calm as well as ferment atmosphere. As so in Looking Back, where wistful almost formless keys are plagued by whizzing accompaniments, only for these to be rested as an electronic toy piano ambles slowly past the listener, bringing a quaint energy to an overtly cinematic listening experience. All the while, recorded sound paints a backdrop of human interaction amid this confluence of synthesis and spirit.

At times proudly striding onward with an epic force inspiring a feeling of overwhelming epiphany, and at others, nestling gently into teary moods of deeply moving piano-led balladry, Connecting positions itself as a truly modern sonic journey. Listeners are brought soaring over beautifully-crafted tracks, charged with fizzling electronic energy and imbued with a divine warmth.

Floating Shrine returns and presents an incredible development from his last outing with Decaying Spheres. A crackling ambient release with a beauty that is both painstakingly unique and innately moving.