Floating Points: Elaenia (10th anniversary edition) [PLUTO]

Why you'll love it

For the 10th anniversary, Matt Colton cut new lacquers at Metropolis. Elaenia was Resident Advisor's album of 2015, a Pitchfork Best New Music with a Metacritic score of 85, and Pitchfork's Philip Sherburne called it "as warm and fluid an 'electronic' album as you will hear all year."

This edition

• 10th anniversary edition
• New lacquers cut by Matt Colton at Metropolis
• Pluto pressing (cat# FPLP01R)

About the album

Sam Shepherd, the producer behind Floating Points, first imagined Elaenia as a single, continuous piece of music. People talked him out of it, and he cut it into seven tracks instead, though it still flows like one long thought. He made the cover art himself by connecting fibre-optic cables to a homemade harmonograph, and named the title track after a dream about a bird swallowed by a forest, which he had after reading David Eagleman's book Sum. It came out on his own Pluto label together with Luaka Bop, David Byrne's label, and it was the record that made his name well beyond the club world.

The music is electronic in name only. Live drums, Rhodes piano, synths and strings drift and swell, "Silhouettes (I, II & III)" is a slow-building centrepiece, and "Peroration Six" ends in a storm of drums and noise. Clash called it "a sweeping, majestic debut that pleases hearts and minds alike." It is the record people put on when they say they do not really like electronic music, shortly before they change their minds.

Tracklist

Listen

On Pluto (cat# FPLP1R), a reissue of the 2015 album.