Manatee Commune - Simultaneity (2024)

Seattle's own Manatee Commune (aka Grant Eadie) makes his long-awaited return to Bastard Jazz with his fourth album, 'Simultaneity'. Lush and vibrant production is familiar to his previous works, though Eadie has significantly matured in the activation of space and character. A step away from standard songwriting, and a total disassociation from lyrics at all, has made this record closer to the ambient genre than anything Manatee Commune has released, all the while keeping one solid foot in the realm of dance music.

'Simultaneity', as a whole, is an exploration of the collision between texture and time. Captured recordings reminiscent of wind in wheatgrass, soft rain showers in the open plains, and cascading beach sand wash over the mix, splashing into warm drones and ascending melodies that cleanly syncopate against a steady rhythm. Though decidedly electronic at times, a raw human element is ever-present in the form of a vocal motif: just tiny moments of a loving voice lost in a sea of reverberation.

The album is a noticeably positive evolution from previous works. All nine tracks depict a calmness and subtlety in musicianship, relying primarily on tenuous snippets of live instrumentation and synthesis that hypnotically coil and coalesce with one another. 'Love Tone', the opening track, features Eadie's partner, a small voice memo clipped and expanded into an ethereal vocal melody. A crisp felt piano delivers a complex arpeggiation in 'Mosaic', a warm sonic bath scape reminiscent of Olafur Arnalds or Kiasmos. Simple, undemanding bass lines drive tracks 'Path' and 'Faulted', though their simplicity is contrasted with a variety of patterns that combine to create unique auditory shapes, both building and landing in satisfying climactic movement. The album culminates in the final track, 'Touch Theme', where a block of sound in the form of a broad, open synthetic chord warms the ears, eventually twisting and shifting to rhythmic chunks that shove against a familiar house rhythm.