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I first discovered Elaenia via a tip-off on social media in mid-2016. It grew on me. At first, it seemed abstract, intellectual, lacking groove. But it served as background music while I wrote in busy cafes and at home with my stepsons playing loudly. Like the best music which I use for that purpose, it lacked repetitive melody, it didn’t get stuck, it fluidly shifted; it never overinsinuated itself. True, after a diet of Oneohtrix Point Never, To Rococo Rot and J Dilla’s Donuts, it was apt to sound busy, especially during the epic neo-jazz-styled “Silhouettes (I, II & III)” (a masterpiece, I now think), and there’s something about Sam Shepherd’s compositions that, at times, seems slightly bloodless (“For Marmish”, for eg, at first sounded like some corny piano-bar make-out soundtrack). But its saving grace is its evanescence. It can’t be grasped. It’s all texture, mood, receding perspective. At first, so little did I grasp it, I barely heard the live instruments, because it lulled me to a place beyond analysis, and because, in its crossing of genre barriers, it does things I’ve never heard live instruments do before. But really, until I saw the live footage on KEXP, I didn’t appreciate it. If you doubt this band, watch that footage; it’s a bravura performance from both musicians and camera crew (and from the obviously spellbound DJ who interviews Sam Shepherd partway through). And it’s at that point—watching them play, as an ensemble—that you’ll realise this is a band and not just Shepherd and backing musicians. Sure, I can see why it’s evolved this way, with Shepherd’s having released so much as Floating Points and the other musicians, in his telling, gravitating around him. And it certainly seems possible that Shepherd is some kind of genius—a classically-trained pianist who recorded electronica on his laptop because he was away from home studying and had no other equipment; who throws in entire sides of Pharoah Sanders in his DJ sets; who held a residency at London’s Plastic People throughout the birth of dubstep; and who constructed a studio from a mountain of rare classic equipment, where he self-produced Elaenia and 2016’s Kuitper. That said, when I saw the band at Brisbane’s Laneway Festival (far from an ideal venue) I found the staging off-putting, centred as it was around a lighting effect with drummer Leo Taylor (stiff, wooden, a little too old-school) and Sam Shepherd (hidden behind a bank of keyboards) front-stage left and right, and bassist Susumu Mukai (imo the secret weapon, all postpunk minimalist grind) and the two guitarists (Alex Reeve is my favourite, for his Edgeian mood-melody and post-Dave-Gilmour virtuosity) virtually hidden. Still, teething problems aside, Elaenia is a mightily inspiring soundcheck, a genre-defying blend of jazz, post-rock and electronica that hints at mindbending revelations to come.