Promises

When the review said dreamlike they weren’t kidding. Lovely and interesting.

This album came out in the throws of the COVID-19 lockdown. When everything was so heavy I decided to buy a new turntable and around the same time I bought this record. It was everything I needed at the time. And it still is.

Ravishing and ravishinger – spare and serious, elegant, expansive and elevating. Great choice – easily one of the better records in any genre released in the last few years Certainly belongs on the list proper. Could replace almost anything, as it's so far outside the genre conventions. Pharaoh Sanders is a treasure.

Wow like Brian Eno picked up a sax

I've finally cracked the code of what makes a good Ambient album. Usually with a bad Ambient record, I'd open Spotify and see that I'm still on song 2 after like 24 millennia. This time, I opened Spotify thinking I'm on song 2 and saw that the album was ending in like 3 minutes. Flows like a river. You love to see it. Also nice to see some better jazz representation. Still can't believe we only had 1 John Coltrane album, 1 Mingus and no Pharoah Sanders on the original list.

I dunno whether it's because I'm listening on a rare chilled Sunday morning or whether it's anything else about the music but I really enjoyed Promises. It's supposed to be a dream-like composition and it certainly takes me on a journey; I tend to think that with ambient music or any sort of wordless composition, if you find yourself checking the track listing to figure out where you are and you're much further through than you expected, that's a good thing, and that happened here. Movement 6 is fantastic, Movement 9 is a startling finish; for something like this you might expect everything to build to a stunning crescendo and awaken from the dream-like state energised and content but it seems to just rip you from it and leave you wondering where you are. Sanders' sax cuts through the orchestral arrangements aggressively but also meshes really well when it needs to, and that give and take makes for a pretty rare experience. I think it's a 4/5, it grabbed me a lot more than I thought it would and I liked it a lot.

Great minimalistic collaboration album of Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and London Symphony Orchestra. It delivers beautiful soundscapes with dreamy jazzy atmospheres.

Loved it, thank you!!

Absolutely beautiful

Amazing. Thank you

Minimalist (I'd almost go as far as to say ambient) jazz from one of the great jazz musicians, supported by a world-class orchestra. Yes. this is a lovely piece of work, and I'm glad I listened to it. Thanks for the suggestion.

However you choose to see it -- a legendary artist passing the torch to a younger one at the twilight of his life ; that young artist paying tribute to said legend by composing such a sumptuous piece for him ; an association between the two gently dissolving genre barriers so as to take the listener to another world -- you just can't deny the beauty displayed by this album, even if it may escape your grasp. Sam Shepherd (aka Floating Points) dilutes and sprinkles his ambient dots and synthetic splashes at the exact right moments, patiently weaving an infinite-sounding cocoon through the same repeated motif on piano and harpsichord. Slowly but surely, that motif builds up to extraordinary sections in the middle of the overarching composition, emphasized by pivotal contributions from the London Symphony Orchestra, adding cinematic and eastern-adjacent layerings to the compositions. Whiffs of Arvo Pärt and Henryk Górecki can indeed be scented in *Promises*, yet the latter is anything but derivative. No other record in the world sounds like this one. After that apex in the central movements, when everything gets quiet again, Shepherd subtly piles up electronic flourishes that could hearken back to Tangerine Dream or Klaus Schulze. Something awesome happened this morning when I listened to this part of the album again. Those flourishes mingled with the sound of birds warbling from outside my window, and I couldn't honestly tell which was which. It took the short yet intense free jazz surge that followed that moment to make me pinpoint the sound of the real birds again... This here isn't new age music by the way... It's for instance forever ambiguous whether you're supposed to reach immanence or transcendence while listening to the record. Depends on how you interpret the titular "promises", I guess. Towards the end of the piece, right after Shepherd stops playing his central motif in the middle of the eighth movement, some slightly sinister overtones even bob through the lush surface, probably pointing to the finality of all things. The atonal coda performed by the LSO in the next and final movement also clearly underlines that theme. Under that light, the repeated central motif was a heartbeat. When it stops, it's as if a soul leaves a mortal coil, travelling to another plane of existence. Yet even when *Promises* points to mortality, it remains soothing throughout somehow. Like a balm on the soul, it encourages acceptance, awareness, openness. As for Sanders, he brings the essential emotional core without whom the music would just linger pleasantly and not necessarily affect you this deeply -- waves of relatable melodies and sensations conveyed through his expert playing of the saxophone, which is both restrained and passionate somehow, evocative of the wisdom and frailty old age brings to your psyche. And the abstracted vocal scaterings the man performs at some key juncture can have the exact same effect on the listener, underlying the humanity expressed by the piece as a whole. I don't know much about Pharaoh Sanders' life and music -- my jazz tastes have first led me to figures such as John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Charles Mingus instead -- but it's easy to see why this album can be considered as another crowning achievement for him in a career already filled with those. One last promise that was held at the very end of a live lived fully. 5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums. 10/10 for more general purposes: 5 + 5. Number of albums from the original list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 465 Albums from the original list I *might* include in mine later on: 288 Albums from the original list I won't include in mine: 336 ----- Number of albums from the users list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 48 (including this one) Albums from the users list I *might* select for mine later on: 61 Albums from the users list I won't select for mine: 111 --- Hey, Émile. J'ai enfin trouvé le temps de répondre ! Regarde sous la review de *Young, Loud And Snotty* des Dead Boys !

Rating: 7/10 Best songs: Movement 1

Real nice

Music nerd jazz + electronic collab to play early morning with coffee or late night with a wine and enjoy for the #vibes

So good

While ambient falls just a bit outside of music I listen to regularly, this is obviously an amazing collaboration between Floating Points (Sam Shepherd), Pharoah Sanders, and the London Symphony Orchestra. The combination of jazz, electronics, and classical music is brilliant and well-executed. Pharoah Sanders’s performance is more subdued than his earlier, more energetic work, but the soulful, subtle sax is in service of the total sound. I get why it was so widely lauded and appeared on so many end-of-year lists in 2021. The recurring theme is meditative, hypnotic, and calming. And yet, the repetitive nature of the main motif is also its biggest drawback, making the album lose momentum after movement six.

Movement 1 - I kept pausing and taking my headphones off...looking around to find who was making that sound ... until I realized it was the piano pedal being released after each repeating note phrase. I love hearing the actual ambient room where a/the recording is made, especially in something pleasantly mysterious like this. I feel like I should have known about Pharoah Sanders (ahh ok he was in Coltrane's band) - so going in with a completely blank slate and coming out with a new keeper album is always a treasure. Not a "for every mood" album (i.e. probably not great on a solo night long highway drive...ooo unless you're bussing overnight staring out at the passing landscape) and I'm sure some might be annoyed by it but for work or just a calming influence I absolutely loved it from start to finish; haven't had something ambient like this in years (harkening back to Eno's "Music for Airports"). 8/10 4 stars.

Although there is a heap of talent far surpassing my puny mind behind this I'm honestly not sure there is all that much there. Maybe I'm not refined enough for it, maybe it required more dedicated and active listening. As it was I found it to be just fine.

Been wanting to listen to this one. Love floating points. I know movement 3 is good. 3

I have to be in the right mood for this, which I was, otherwise I might fall asleep.

Perfect music as background in a fancy restaurant or something. Not something I would actively put on again. It sure may be a relaxing moment for some

This was quite relaxing and lovely. I was hoping for a bit more variation musically, but it was a pleasant listen.

If you're into chill symphony music, you may like this.

This felt like a toned down kamasai Washington album. Simple dreamy like structure with great sax melodies. Overall it’s really nice and simple while still being interesting and enjoyable. I’d listen to this again. 6.7/10

Nice gentle drifting background to my day.

Expected a lot from this LP and left disappointed. Combining the ethereal electronic Floating Points is known for with a full orchestra's magnificence seems like an unmistakable win, but the main theme is so piddling and timid that this quickly becomes 45 minutes of slog. Pharaoh Sanders' excellent sax does its best to inject some liveliness, but then feels foreign atop an ultimately banal melody. The composition here is just not good (at least to my taste), and I'm left wondering what could have been if someone had written a melody that dared to get above a meek whisper.

Ambient jazz. As sparse as it gets.

It's fitting that the songs are all called "movements" here, because it was SHIT. 2/5.

Minimalismo. Música clásica leeeeeenta. Rollo. Un 2.

Not my vibe at all I’m afraid. Happy for those that it is, but don’t go putting this on during a road trip or I’ll be putting in AirPods.

Ughhh you have every album in the world and choose to do the boringest one? What is wrong. You guys get through 1000+ albums and then shit the bed. Why am I listening to something that sounds like an 87 year old man struggle to get out of bed while someone plays an instrument on the background.