- On their first full release since 2011, Mark Clifford and Sarah Peacock bring a renewed sense of sonic clarity to their reliably haunted electronic post-rock.
- It's hard to know whether to call Seefeel a legacy act. We usually count on legacy acts to be reliable and tangible, with an arc of recordings that tell the story of the time and eras they've spanned. Mark Clifford and Sarah Peacock's first extended release in 13 years Everything Squared, doesn't feel like a band trading on their reputation—the initial impression is one of change. The pair had done a fine job of laying waste to expectations and pigeonholing since the early '90s, when they were tangled up in the parallel zeitgeists of shoegaze's washed-out grandeur and electronica's metallic clank. Even then, they fit into neither, thanks to an amalgamation of post-rock guitar treatments, ethereal vocal distortions and crunchy machine textures that smudged the genre lines. Seefeel sounded anomalous at their inception, and their mini-album Everything Squared feels equally, beautifully adrift in time and space.
As the de facto bandleader of the project, Clifford recently told The Quietus that earlier members sometimes struggled with the stark shifts in the process he would steer from release to release. On their debut album Quique, Seefeel came across as an experimental rock band digging into the possibilities of heavily processed guitars and dubby pulsations, while their landmark Warp Records debut Succour pushed industrial drum machines to the forefront. By the time they released (CH-VOX) in 1996, the split between traditional instrumentation and synthesis was shrouded in electro-acoustic minimalism and otherworldly overtones. When 2011's self-titled album ended a 14-year hiatus for the group, the sharp, dynamic layers of distorted guitar and psych-pop lilt made clear Seefeel were never meant to be predictable.
Nearly double the time has passed, but thanks to this commitment to reinvention, Everything Squared arrives unburdened by the weight of expectation. When the band announced Seefeel they presented it as a broader group effort featuring Shigeru "DJ Scotch Egg" Ishihara on bass and former Boredoms drummer E-Da, and the sound felt more kinetic in kind. Everything Squared finds Clifford zeroing in on his process while Peacock's vocals continue to provide a crucial human quality to the band's reliably enigmatic sound (Ishihara also underpins two tracks with submerged, subliminal bass). What holds Seefeel's relatively modest catalogue together is a consistently haunted mood.
The sense of spirits caught in a liminal flux is instantly noticeable in Everything Squared's first track, "Sky Hooks," which finds ambiguous beauty and a fragile tension in the interplay between Peacock's pitched-up vocal and the slippery string tones. As the celestial voices pass back and forth, mixed uncomfortably close without being threatening, they strike uneasy harmonies with the blown-out chords blooming in the middle distance. You can also feel this fraught melancholy in the strung-out, fuzzed-up guitar pealing out laconically over "Lose The Minus," and in the expressive clang of drowning metallic percussion and ink-blot synthesis on "End Of Here."
Seefeel's affinity for dub sensibilities partly shapes the pensive mood permeating their music. Quique's looming, subby basslines and tangible negative space gave their music a distinct poise in contrast to the wall-of-sound ethic prevalent in most shoegaze and avant-rock. The throbbing low-end underpinning fluttering micro-loops of guitar and twinkling flourishes on "Multifolds" maintains that approach as a guiding principle for Seefeel on Everything Squared. The chasmic space that opens up around "Antiskeptic"'s slow-stepping, noise-caked drums feels weighted with sound system intent–a physical impression enhanced by the roughly hewn pillars of synth that intermittently burst up from the floor of the track. It's not dub by numbers by any stretch, but rather the kind of bold abstraction of dub's methodology that can be heard in pioneering mavericks like Ossia and The Bug—artists who might well cite Seefeel as enduring influences.
What feels different about Clifford and Peacock's application of these sonic tropes on Everything Squared is the sharpness in the production. In his interview with The Quietus, Clifford described his renewed focus on honing each sound to get the best possible result. It shows in the crisp definition of "Hooked Paw"'s sound palette and "End Of Here"'s refined contrast between light and shade, balancing frequencies to inject even the creepiest tracks with a brilliance that they sometimes smudged in the trademark murk of the Seefeel atmosphere. In this sense, it's Seefeel sounding the best they ever have.
Peacock's vocals especially benefit from this more considered approach to the mixdown. Her aforementioned opening coos on "Sky Hooks" are pitched up to a child-like timbre that calls to mind the fragile mantras and soaring cries on classic tracks revisited on their 2021 anthology, Rupt and Flex (1994 - 96), like "Evio" and "Spangle"—except they're much brighter than the half-hidden murmurs in the Seefeel of old. In the process, Clifford and Peacock wind up with a record that fits into a contemporary mode of icy sound system experimentation they helped inspire in the first place. In the arc of their evolution, Everything Squared is both a closed loop back to the fundamentals of the band's sound and a new tributary opening up, once again confusing any attempts to accurately place Seefeel anywhere but in their own time and space.
Tracklist01. Sky Hooks
02. Multifolds
03. Lose The Minus
04. Antiskeptic
05. Hooked Paw
06. End Of Here