Sam Shepherd built his name on deep house cuts, Eglo 12-inches and a genre-hopping catalogue that already stretched from broken beat to free jazz. Now he's added a new credit: ballet composer. Floating Points' first full score for the stage, "Mere Mortals", gets its studio release via Deutsche Grammophon on August 28, and it's arriving with the kind of institutional backing club music rarely sees.
What exactly is Mere Mortals?
"Mere Mortals" is a full-length ballet made for San Francisco Ballet, commissioned by artistic director Tamara Rojo and choreographed by Aszure Barton, with visuals by Hamill Industries. It premiered at the War Memorial Opera House in January 2024, and it retells the Greek myth of Pandora and Prometheus as a parable about artificial intelligence: what happens when curiosity opens a box nobody can close again.
Shepherd says he pushed back on the myth's usual reading. "Pandora's not about bringing hell to Earth," he told The Line of Best Fit. "She really represents curiosity and change." He's also blunt about how the story got flattened over centuries of translation: "The translations robbed her of her agency."
Pandora's not about bringing hell to Earth. She really represents curiosity and change.
Why does a house producer end up scoring a ballet?
This isn't Shepherd's first move outside club walls. "Promises", his 2021 record with Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra, already proved he could write for a full orchestra without losing what makes his production distinct. Ballet is a different discipline again: music that has to serve choreography, cue by cue, night after night, performed live rather than triggered from a laptop.
By his own account, it wasn't the obvious next step. "I'd never even considered writing a ballet before," he said. What changed his mind, he told the outlet, was hearing his written score turned into something else entirely once a live player took it on: "When I heard the music I'd written on the page transformed by Cordula's exquisite violin-playing, it made me excited to write more in the future." For an artist who came up sampling and sequencing, that's a genuinely different creative loop, and it's the clearest sign of what a deep-house producer stands to gain from the concert-hall world: new collaborators, new instruments, an audience that has never set foot in a club.
What's actually on the record?
The album runs fourteen movements, credited to Floating Points and the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra, described by Deutsche Grammophon as a mix of elegiac strings, apocalyptic brass and pulsing electronics. Two tracks are already out ahead of the August 28 release: "Falling to Earth", a 13-minute piece drawn from the ballet's eighth movement, and "Her Gift", a duet for harp and Therevox that scores Epimetheus falling for Pandora while Prometheus warns him off.
The live show keeps touring alongside the record. Shepherd performs the score in person with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra at the Edinburgh International Festival, August 28-30, then with the Royal Ballet Sinfonia at Sadler's Wells in London, September 9-12.
