When Talking Heads released "Remain In Light" in 1980, the polyrhythmic, loveable mess produced by Brian Eno, it affected generations of musicians (and will continue to do so forever), and Shearwater was obviously affected by that when grooving out what became the track "Filaments".

As Shearwater are very soon soon releasing their new album, "Jet Plane and Oxbow", they've issued a podcast that's available for download if you buy the album through Sub Pop. Go do! In it, there's a lot of edited demo recordings available, along with Jonathan being interviewed about the album, birding in Guyana and more.

One of the demo excerpts is one named "Filaments". Here's a funky bit from the podcast:

[audio:https://niklasblog.com/wp-content/2016-01-08-shearwater-th.mp3]

The demo is quite similar to what ended up on the Shearwater album, bar more sweeping synth effects, percussion, song, piano and reed.

As contrast to that Talking Heads album, below's a demo track for what became "Once In A Lifetime" on the album; this one's called "Right Start":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0tLcvP9Sx8

To me, even the synth as used by Shearwater is there on the Talking Heads album...in a way.

There's an excerpt of the podcast available here, and the entire Shearwater album is already available for streaming online, if you buy it through Sub Pop.