Seefeel sprung up in 1993 with the release of their debut album off the back of a series of glittering EPs. With each record their style and sound shifted, confounding journalists and record labels alike. They were initially lumped in with shoegaze, post rock, and then IDM, largely due to their Warp and Rephlex associations. Yet none of that quite captures the truly engrossing blend of ambient electronics, pop-adjacent melodies, and mangled but uplifting guitar-slinging that Seefeel were creating.
Everything Squared gives the first glimpse of what Seefeel have been up to since 2011’s eponymous outing. It’s not unusual to wait a while between Seefeel releases – there was a fourteen-year silent stretch between ’97 and 2010 – but it turns out this period has been a particularly creative purple patch: “There’s enough music to release two or three albums a year” main musical instigator Mark Clifford explained in a recent interview with tQ. The original quartet has been whittled down to a core duo of Clifford and Sarah Peacock with the former now responsible for the bulk of the musical output, only enlisting Peacock to contribute recondite vocals from her Berlin base.
Peacock’s striking lilt hammers home the Tri-Angle Records-shaped gap that Seefeel’s return so comfortably fills. Opener ‘Sky Hooks’ combines cascading chimes and airy pads with her chirpy wordless phrases which beckon to us in an unrecognisable language. It’s a sound bath that calls to mind fresh air bubbles breaking on the surface of a natural spring located deep in the mountains.
This bucolic thread continues throughout the record. ‘Antiskeptic’ is as full of chirrups as a bush packed with small, chattering birds. Its heavy lumbering drums of static-sizzled snares, and hard, wooden kick reverberate as if triggered in the centre of an amphitheatre. They wouldn’t be out of place on either Wander/Wonder by Balam Acab or Clams Casino’s Rainforests EP.
Previous collaborator Shigeru Ishihara, who you might recognise as the brilliantly belligerent Gameboy obliterator, DJ Scotch Egg, hops on bass duties for two tracks, finding deep rhythms to propel along their cloud-like wafts. He adds a sense of direction but also a darker tone as his bass lines loosely lock with the bass drum. Bright cheeps are replaced with disconcerted, waif-like mewling and the synths give a sense of someone battering pipes in a backroom.
This creeping darkness repeats in the fade out of ‘Lose The Minus’ with its distorted guitar chords gradually ringing out to nothing. The finale, however, returns to the early airy clouds billowing broader and brighter before being stripped right down to a trio of melancholy keys sighing their way to the end à la William Basinski’s famous Disintegration Loops.
Thirty years later, Seefeel still know how to push our buttons.
