Nothing is ever completed in a Seefeel tune. There is no such thing as a remaining outcome—only a snapshot of an experiment in progress, a course of in movement. Some sound like they’ve been going for a really very long time—the tempo glacial, galactic. We’d hear a sourceless scrap of guitar, an errant drum, a lonely wisp of Sarah Peacock’s voice. A dread bass pulse the middle of gravity. All these bits of shrapnel cling in tentative constellations; they drift. The forces at work are hidden from the ear: the strategies arcane, the method inscrutable. The type of a given tune is sort of a snapshot of the increasing cosmos at an arbitrary level in its evolution, a thumbnail picture of infinity.
Over time, the UK group—at present the duo of Peacock and producer/multi-instrumentalist Mark Clifford—has supplied clues as to the character, if not the causes, of its cosmological dub. The 1995 tune “Utreat,” the loneliest and most minimalist factor Seefeel had but created, stretched like a bridge from the ultimate facet of Succour to the opening of the next 12 months’s (Ch-vox), the place it appeared in much more stripped-down kind as “Utreat (Full).” Three years in the past, the field set Rupt and Flex (1994-96) unpacked the overlapping periods for each albums, gathering a number of variations that knocked acquainted varieties out of their recognized orbits. A drum half may lurch to the fore, or be swallowed into the space; a smudge of previous suggestions may draw novel shapes in opposition to the black. In a number of circumstances, the band appeared merely to be toying with the playback pace—sluggish, slower, slowest—and coaxing new frequencies out of the tape with each cross.
Squared Roots gives the clearest image but—nicely, besides that the photographs are blurred nearly past recognition—of the group’s dubwise, recombinant philosophy. All seven tracks spring from the identical supplies that yielded this previous August’s Every part Squared, which was Seefeel’s first new album in 13 years. There have been six tracks there, and although the brand new report is about half a minute shorter, there are seven right here—a minor element that I feel says one thing about the best way Seefeel’s sounds mutate and proliferate, like micro organism in a Petri dish.
Like Every part Squared, Squared Roots is about 50 p.c thump, 50 p.c shimmer. Dully thudding kick drums and answering swells of bass present the body; every thing else is a few summary spinoff of guitar and wordless voice, each of them stretched and smeared and dubbed past recognition. The guitars sound much less like guitars than freight-train whistles, cool breezes, a winter dawn; Peacock’s voice sounds much less like singing than a celestial sigh. It’s unattainable to explain with any sort of certainty the connection between the sooner tracks and these new ones: Are these tough drafts or later variations? Alternate takes or precise glimpses of alternate dimensions?
