My first experience with Floating Points occurred about a month ago, at Berlin’s mythic and formidable Berghain. At 12:30 my boyfriend and I had, with a mask of timid nonchalance, approached the club’s doors in an effort to see Hyperdub’s ten year anniversary, and by a stroke of luck (that stroke in the form of an unbearable couple in front of us who refused to leave the line after being denied entry, thus making us look completely inoffensive in comparison) were flippantly beckoned into the brutalist warehouse by a balding bouncer, whose approval, like that of a stern father’s, I both rejected and secretly desired. Now it was the early hours of the morning, when the first hints of fatigue began to replace my enchantment and the cold German sun seeped through the windows, reminding me that I made this silly decision to stay out all night back when the light was a lot less harsh on the eyes. We journeyed upstairs to seek a temporary relief from the aggressive and industrial sounds that had been jolting through us on the expansive ground floor, and ended up at Panorama Bar, where I was greeted by sounds that seemed to me like an angelic choir lifting me skyward with my weary soul in tow. But it wasn’t an angelic choir. It was disco. Track after track of sweet, delicious late-era soul and early-era dance music, spun by a short, pale Englishman in thick-rimmed glasses, to a crowd of tired young people who needed a place to dance and rest at the same time. Sam Shepherd saved me that morning, from what could have been the most depressing post-club comedown of my life.

“You know, he makes his own music,” my boyfriend informed me when we returned to America and started playing his Summer13at45 DJ set continuously in the car. I heard him, but part of me didn’t want to acknowledge what he was saying. Which is weird, right? Why wouldn’t I want to listen to the original work of my Eurotrip savior?

I knew it had something to do with saying goodbye to Floating Points the DJ and introducing myself to Floating Points the producer. And in this way I also knew that it had to do with something that was not just musical, but interpersonal, even emotional. I only understood the entire answer to such a question, though, when I finally sat down and gave his most recent release, King Bromeliad/Montparnasse a listen.

My first emotion when the A-side of this record began was relief—relief that this music shared a strong and sturdy thread of sensibility with the music that I heard in Panorama Bar that night (morning). The music did sound different, of course; one would perhaps not even place it in the same genre, and it was more brooding, more sinister, than the lighthearted tunes I heard in Berlin, but there was still a hunger for a certain sound—the kind of groove that you can really only recognize through a completely intuitive channel. And that’s when I realized the issue of my relief was the same as the issue of my reluctance: I was scared to learn that Floating Points was not the person I had first encountered.

Which has really gotten me thinking about the divide between the DJ and the producer. Which has in turn really gotten me thinking about the divide between the public and private personality. When I first saw Floating Points, I was experiencing his extroverted side, the public mask portrayed through a curated collage of external influences. And isn’t that the same thing that happens when you first meet a person at a party, when you get that glimmer of a feeling through your surface interactions that indicate, Hey, maybe this person and I could really get along? And isn’t it always a little frightening when you take the next step to hang out with them in private, and know that in that moment, any number of details could be revealed in the midst of such vulnerability that could shake your entire notion of who this person is? And isn’t that relief I felt after hearing King Bromeliad the same relief that you have when you realize that you were right about this person all along, that though there might be things you didn’t know about them, that your instinct was correct?

So maybe that is why finding a new artist so often feels like making a new friend.

King Bromeliad/Montparnasse is out now via Eglo Records.