Spectreview: Sea Raft – Blending EP

-LIGHT CORAL-

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Matthew Reeder’s talent as a composer has been self-evident ever since he started releasing pieces under his own name years ago. Working within the confines of classical and electronic instrumentation, Reeder approaches open-hearted ambient music with an intellectual’s touch, designing whole locales to get lost in. His virtually-unnoticed 2018 album Nature Would Ventilate, for example, brings the listener into the temporal leisure of plantlife, an 80-minute venture of life back into death that is, if not wholly captivating, an incredible testament to the rewards of patience. As Sea Raft, Reeder claims to dip into the waters of IDM, though the genre moniker might be a bit of a red herring: Blending is far and away his most accessible offering, a successful “blending” of Reeder’s signature ambient pacing with the irresistible thump of dance music. Barring a few clarinet samples, live instrumentation has been jettisoned in favor of exquisitely-produced synth soundscapes and pads, with a good variety of flavors and moods across its six tracks. The EP’s best moments come at an intersection of inventiveness and sheer pleasure, like the crushed, phased staccato plunks punctuating the elegant, thrumming build-up on “Immediacy” (just what is being sampled there?) or the downbeat slowly emerging from a the fog of a crystalline 5/4 thump on the climactic “Penta.” What’s intriguing about this particular project is how its apparent focus is on the simple pleasures of dance music, as opposed to any overarching concept: the elements of Reeder’s heady take on ambient are all here, but the classic hallmarks of IDM add another dimension by allowing the listener to enjoy the music without the shackles of active interpretation. Tracks like the dreamlike “Flood Mapping” and the glorious iridescent sunrise of closer “Whenever You Look Up” are meant to be felt instead of processed, but coming from a cerebral composer like Reeder it feels like a small gift to the listener, and for that we should be thankful.

Recommended for calculus homework.