Floating Room is the recording project of multidisciplinary Uchinanchu American artist Maya Stoner, based in the traditional land of the Chinook, Cowlitz and Clackamas peoples (now otherwise known as Portland). In 2018, Stoner released False Baptism, an album that blended slowcore, dream pop and lo-fi rock to explore the nature of epiphany—its unexpected appearances in life, the blank slate it offers. The false baptism might be anything, but the result is the same. A washing away of what has been done, a fresh start emerging from the beneath the soundless water, or the coughing gasp for air upon breaching the surface.
This autumn sees Floating Room back with a brand new EP, Tired & True, a release that in many ways stems from an epiphany of its own. Formed under the heat and pressure of personal change, the songs came to life during a summer that saw Stoner graduate art school, step down from their position as president of Good Cheer Records, and move beyond the influence of an ex-partner to regain complete artistic control. The result is Floating Room washed clean, clarified, more themselves than ever before and ready to press forward in whatever direction feels most natural.
Lead single ‘Held Open Door’ gives a glimpse at this new style. Described as concerning “the mourning of youth, the temptation of vice, and loss of naiveté,” the track engages with growing up, exploring what is gained and lost but also challenging assumptions too. So often non-male, non-white art is expected to be an empowering force, a declaration of strength to be repeated over and over should doubt set in, but Stoner wishes to delve beyond such surface-level concerns. To be an individual in all of its ambiguity and nuance (brought out in the intricate, idiosyncratic sound). One with failings and vices and sharp, jagged edges. An individual capable of more than providing feelgood proclamations of strength, one able to contest the forces that prop up such conventions in the first place.
I know I am strong
but strength don’t get me high
I get so bored
and I want to feel alive