by Dan Goldin (@post_trash_)
Portland’s Floating Room have a knack for making great music that shifts priorities between release. They nailed the dreamy shoegaze of False Baptism back in 2018 and last year’s Tired and True was a masterpiece of heartfelt noise pop, with an emphasis on the pop. The five tracks were each a testament to the strength of Maya Stoner’s songwriting, weaving between enormous hooks and intelligent structures. While we eagerly await a new full length from the band, today they’ve announced Shima, a new EP due out November 12th via Famous Class Records (Upchuck, Charles Moothart, Wasted Shirt). With this one, Floating Room are getting heavier.
The EP’s lead single is “Shimanchu,” a song that reflects Stoner’s Uchinanchu heritage and a retaliation to the condescension she faces daily as an Asian American woman. It’s a song about feeling alienated but mad enough to push back, to fight against the bullshit, addressing not only the problems faced by many Asian Americans, but the silence and lack of support from those around them. The song starts with a big distorted crunch similar to Floating Room’s prior EP but takes a hard shift into something far more volatile, as Stoner repeatedly screams the hook with seething intensity. While the song is clearly rooted in heavier subjects, the video pays homage to Dance Dance Revolution as both an animated and live in-person version of Maya dance away the trauma of it all.
Speaking about the single and video, Maya shared:
“This is a really fun music video for a song about some extremely un-fun topics. My people, the Indigenous people of so-called Okinawa, Japan, identify as Shimanchu which translates to “Island People.” Every day I watched as Asian people here in America were beaten and murdered and the silence surrounding it all was deafening. Meanwhile, in my ancestral land, Japan was and still is letting the U.S. build a military base using soil that contains the bones of my ancestors. A third of our people died brutally during the war and were an innocent civilian population caught between belligerents—“attacked by tigers at the front gate and wolves at the back” is how some Okinawans describe it. The construction of this new base is desecration of the highest magnitude, committed by both the U.S. and Japan, two equally abhorrent global empires. When I wrote this I was “left stranded alone in my rage,” as Cathy Park Hong writes. I can count the number of Shimanchu people I have met in Portland on one hand, so I have always been an island, but never in my life had I ever felt so alone. Writing this song allowed me to feel empowered in my isolation and through catharsis momentarily escape.
I had been wanting to make a DDR music video for a while because it’s a game my siblings and I loved as kids. It’s funny this ended up being the song the idea was used for, because in hindsight there’s something very Asian American about it.”
Tour Dates with Citizen, Drug Church, and Glitterer:
11/14 Minneapolis, MN @ Amsterdam
11/16 Lawrence, KS @ Bottleneck
11/17 Denver, CO @ Oriental Theatre
11/18 Salt Lake City, UT @ Soundwell
11/20 Vancouver, BC @ Biltmore Cabaret
11/21 Seattle, WA @ The Crocodile
11/22 Portland, OR @ Hawthorne Theatre
11/24 Berkeley, CA @ Cornerstone
11/26 Los Angeles, CA @ The Lodge Room
11/27 Los Angeles, CA @ The Lodge Room
11/28 Phoenix, AZ @ Crescent Ballroom
11/30 Austin, TX @ Empire Garage
12/01 Dallas, TX @ DaDa
12/03 Springfield, MO @ Outland Ballroom
12/04 Chicago, IL @ Bottom Lounge
12/05 Cleveland, OH @ Mahalls 20 Lanes
12/06 Columbus, OH @ Ace of Cups
12/08 Atlanta, Georgia @ Masquerade - Hell
12/09 Orlando, FL @ The Abbey
12/10 Tampa, FL @ Crowbar
12/11 Durham, NC @ Motorco
12/12 Washington DC @ Union Stage
12/13 Philadelphia, PA @ Theatre of Living Arts
12/15 Asbury Park, NJ @ House of Independents
12/16 Brooklyn, NY @ Elsewhere
12/17 Boston, MA @ The Paradise
12/18 Toronto, ON @ Velvet Underground
12/19 Detroit, MI @ Magic Stick