Being both a DJ and a producer is very common, but doing both as well as Floating Points is very rare. As a DJ, Sam Shepherd blends all kinds of seemingly disparate styles. See him play and you're as likely to hear meditative jazz or psychedelic Brazilian songs as anything you'd call dance music. Often the records he plays are incredibly sought after. Gilles Peterson, a DJ who shares Shepherd's taste for rare records, traded his Mitsuoka , a Japanese car that looks like a Jaguar MK II, for Shepherd's 7-inch copy of João Donato's. As a producer, he's made music that's both critically acclaimed and stylistically diverse. Often his work is wonderfully unclassifiable. Shepherd is remarkable because he plays and makes records that rarely stick to one way of doing things. What's even more remarkable is how often he nails it.Shepherd's skill-set is as diverse as his music. He writes, plays, records, engineers and mixes almost all of his music, at times directing ensembles of up to 16 musicians. He's involved with three record labels: most famously Eglo, but also Pluto and the reissue label Melodies. When he found himself disappointed with the quality of DJ mixers on the market, he made his own in collaboration with Isonoe, a fantastic sounding and impractically oversized piece of high-end kit called the FP Mixer. When he struggled to get dubplates cut, he travelled to the German countryside to learn how to do it himself, taking a week-long course with an eccentric cutting-master. When he launched Melodies, he didn't just re-issue a rare record. He wrote and published a fanzine to accompany the release, complete with charts and spoof ads for Shepherd's services as a wedding DJ. When I met Shepherd at his studio, he told me he'd been organising visas for the 12 musicians in his band ahead of an international tour. He joked that he's becoming "megalomaniacal."This list of achievements is even more mind-boggling when you consider that until last year his music career was something of a side project. Shepherd earned his doctorate in 2014 after spending four years studying a PhD in neuroscience and epigenetics at University College London. His days were spent in the lab doing work that involved "a lot of microscopes." Gigs and studio sessions filled his spare time."I would leave early every Friday, sneak my record bag into uni and go straight to Heathrow," said Shepherd. "There'd be times when I'd have a Thursday gig and I'd go to the airport, then be back in the lab by the morning. Those weeks were brutal. I did a Milan Design Week show. I flew out at 4 PM and was back in the lab by 9 AM the next day." Luckily, Shepherd had an "unbelievably supportive" PhD supervisor who himself was "a massive music head.""I was definitely a more diligent student than I was a musician, and I prioritised going into the lab—if anything just because I felt like I was letting my friends down in the lab. We all started our PhDs together and they were smashing it. They were getting papers in Nature. It was tricky because there were lots of nice and exciting offers on the table for work, interesting projects artistically. But I was like, I want to make music so badly that if I wait three years and get this done I could dedicate the rest of my life to music."Balancing the two worlds was far from easy, and music often became a release from the occasionally disheartening world of science. "It was difficult. There were times when I was having a really bad time with science. Things weren't working out. A lot of times it wasn't working out but music was the reason I would stick with the PhD at that point because it gave me so much comfort. I was having a lot of fun making music and I was having fun releasing records myself."In Shepherd's studio you get a sense of this fun. A darkened basement room with red strip-lighting, the place is an audio-nerd's paradise. There are vintage synthesisers, high-end speakers, tape-machines and myriad musical instruments. It's the kind of gear you'd expect to see rack-mounted in a mega-bucks studio, but Shepherd has it all crammed haphazardly into one cluttered space. In the corner of the room is his record cutting lathe where he presses tracks to PVC, a more durable material than the traditional acetate used for dubplates. In the back room is a harmonograph, a homespun contraption Shepherd made from wood and fibre-optic cable. He used it to create the artwork for his new album,The array of flashing lights and dials in the studio is bewildering, but during our conversation Shepherd quietly explained the purpose of each piece of kit. "I don't obsess about hardware even though it might seem like I do with this setup," he said. "I don't get new equipment until I've learned inside-out how one piece of equipment works." He pointed to a modular synth: "With this, I've got another rack but I have a rule that I don't buy another module until I've exhausted all of the possibilities I can imagine. I always find I make the most interesting stuff once I've nailed my understanding of how something works."