Arts & Culture

TEST SPIN: Katie Dey — Flood Network

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Who the fuck is Katie Dey stealing from? I’m scratching my head and listening to Flood Network over and over and over again, but I just can’t figure it out. At first glance it seems like there’s no way an album so steeped in internet culture, electronic beats and that post-ironic brand of savvy melancholia which has come to define bedroom maestros the world over could possibly have sprung into itself sounding so brashly little like anything else in the world. But — excepting Dey’s first EP, asdfasdf — it does. It’s an album to itself, and a remarkable, confusing, comforting, vulnerable, terrifying, difficult one at that.

80s

TEST SPIN: Porches — Pool

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Porches frontman Aaron Maine seems to have spent the past couple of years enjoying, like so many of us, a great run of ’80s synthpop inspired indie records. His latest release Pool bears heavily the mark of their influence. I began listening to Porches in 2014 after (unfortunately) missing their Fanclub Collective show at Watermargin. At the time, the band was promoting Slow Dance in The Cosmos — a lo-fi pop/indie rock ode to melancholy punctuated by moments of high energy and lyrical hilarity (see “Headsgiving,” “Fog Fog,” “Jesus Universe”). At the time, the band both exemplified and exceeded much of what I would have expected from a band touring the basement scene/small venue circuit.

Arts & Culture

TEST SPIN: Floating Points — Elaenia

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By MAX VAN ZILE

Elaenia is the full-length debut of English DJ Sam Shepherd, known as Floating Points, who had released a few minor projects in the dance scene and who has reportedly spent five years crafting this album. The finished product was worth the effort. In its complexity, ambition and technological pulse, Elaenia sounds like music of the future. It is difficult to pin down a genre — although most transparently associated with electronic music, it undoubtedly includes elements of free jazz and the compositional rigor of modern classical. Its best moments, like the soaring strings-and synths climax on “Silhouettes (I, II, and III)” and the hypnotic echo of “Argente,” are absolutely beautiful.