Seefeel

The return of post-rock

Mark Clifford & Sarah Peacock of Seefeel

Book update! My latest book, In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor, is still available from Amazon and direct from the publisher. There is no ebook version yet, but I have been informed that one is coming...

Leo Records update! I made the announcement a few weeks ago, and now it’s actually happening. Burning Ambulance Music has partnered with legendary avant-garde jazz label Leo Records to bring their vast catalog to Bandcamp.

Leo Records, founded in 1979 by producer Leo Feigin, was launched with the Amina Claudine Myers album Song For Mother E, which came to CD for the first time in 2023. Over the 45 years since its founding, the label has released hundreds of titles by Anthony Braxton, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Marilyn Crispell, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Ivo Perelman, Joëlle Léandre, Joe and Mat Maneri, and many others, including legends of avant-garde Russian jazz like the Ganelin Trio, Sainkho Namchylak, Simon Nabatov and Sergey Kuryohkin.

Leo Records releases have often been difficult to come by in the US, because of distribution issues and the challenges faced by record stores. These artists have made brilliant music for decades, and it deserves to be heard by as many people as possible. Bandcamp’s global reach makes that a reality.

The first 20 titles will be released September 6, but they’re available for pre-order now at leorecords.bandcamp.com. They are:

Anthony Braxton, Quartet (London) 1985; Quartet (Birmingham) 1985; Quartet (Coventry) 1985; Quintet (London) 2004; Quartet (Moscow) 2008

Marilyn Crispell, Live in Zurich; Gaia; For Coltrane; Santuerio; Stellar Pulsations/Three Composers; Dream Libretto; Selected Works 1983-1986

Amina Claudine Myers, Song For Mother E; Salutes Bessie Smith

Sun Ra, What Planet Is This?; Live At Praxis ’84; Second Star To The Right (Salute To Walt Disney); Stardust From Tomorrow; The Sun Ra Arkestra Meets Salah Ragab In Egypt

All these titles are available for pre-order now at leorecords.bandcamp.com. 20 more will be released in early October, and 20 more every month after that until we run out, which won’t be for a while, trust me.

I never had any strong feelings about the term “post-rock”. I think Simon Reynolds came up with it, in The Wire (naturally). It seemed to upset some people, probably because of its acknowledgement — in the ’90s, even! The era of grunge/“alternative”! — that rock’s era of cultural primacy had passed. But it didn’t bother me, because I’m not one of those people who needs the music he likes to be Important.

A lot of the music that fell under the post-rock umbrella slipped right by me, though, because I was more interested in loud, aggressive sounds: industrial, death metal, free jazz, screwface NYC hip-hop. Eventually, though, a few things made it onto my radar. One group (if that’s even the right term) that completely fascinated me was Main.

Main was the duo of Robert Hampson and Scott Dawson, both of whom had been members of the droning psychedelic rock band Loop. (I never heard Loop until a few years ago, when their catalog was remastered and reissued. I recommend checking them out, but they are very, very different from Main.)

Hampson and Dawson’s work as Main (and it was mostly Hampson doing the work, though Dawson contributed intriguing sounds which his partner then manipulated) was something I had no real frame of reference for. I could hear sounds that seemed familiar — an occasional dubby bass line, some saxophone — but other things were so disguised in the sampling and mixing process that it was impossible to tell what they’d originally been. Their tracks were simply collages of sounds, and the musical logic was obvious but impenetrable. I didn’t know what they were going for, so it was hard to decide whether they’d succeeded or not, except that I found the music incredibly absorbing, especially their first full-length album, Motion Pool, the first two (of four) Firmament EPs, and their magnum opus, Hz, a collection of six EPs sold individually, one a month for six months — when you bought the sixth one, you got a box to keep them all in — and repackaged in the US as a 2CD set.

What’s all this got to do with Seefeel? Well, I knew their name, but never listened to them when they were active. But in 2021, two of their albums, 1995’s Succour and 1996’s Ch-Vox, along with some early EPs and bonus tracks, were reissued as the Rupt + Flex 94-96 box set, and I checked out a track or two and was very pleasantly surprised by what I heard. I don’t know why, but I had expected a shoegaze band along the lines of Lush or Slowdive or maybe Cocteau Twins. This was not that. This sounded like someone else working in the same territory as Main, albeit softer and prettier. I bought the box and have been swimming around in it ever since.

The creative core of Seefeel was guitarist/producer Mark Clifford and vocalist Sarah Peacock, though there were four members in all and they appear to have actually functioned in a conventional rock-band sort of way early on. The four-track Starethrough EP and the “Fracture”/“Tied” single sound like trippy remixes of shoegaze songs, the kind of things that would have appeared on an import CD single but are here the main attraction. Some tracks have pounding, blown-out drums, and there are vocals, but they’ve been sampled into echoing snippets; you never hear a full word or a phrase.

The Succour album (they released one earlier album, Quique, before signing with Warp Records; it’s not in the box, and I’ve never heard it) employs a similar compositional philosophy, but on a larger scale. The first track, “Meol”, is built from a few key sounds, some of which were definitely made on a guitar and others that could be a synthesizer or a sample. It hovers in place and makes you feel like you’re floating through a reddish cloud suffused with light emanating from an unknown source.

The next piece, “Extract”, centers around a three-tone figure and a thumping beat, not quite hip-hop but aware of hip-hop. A dubby bass line bulges in the middle of the mix, some gentle drones fill much of the rest of the space, and Peacock’s voice floats through periodically, sampled and echoed to sound like someone calling your name in a dream. Again, it sounds like a remix of itself. It makes you wonder what the original song sounded like.

But it’s when you remember that this is the original song that Seefeel spins your head around. At least, that’s what happened with me. This is the kind of music that makes you aware of its construction, and makes you start thinking about what we understand as How Things Work.

I know how rock and pop songs work. Brief intro (optional); first verse; chorus; second verse; chorus; bridge; guitar solo (optional); third verse; chorus (possibly repeated); end (or fade out). Even hip-hop songs used this format, until the last decade or so. They had full verses, and choruses. The bridge/solo section might be devoted to scratching, if the group had a DJ, but it was still there.

I know how jazz pieces work, too. Intro/head melody; a sequence of solos, sometimes separated by returns to the head melody; finally a full return to the head and conclusion. Even some of the most aggressive “free” jazz, like Peter Brötzmann’s “Machine Gun”, employs this form.

Seefeel’s music does not have this structure. There are no verses, there are no choruses. A piece simply begins, sometimes with a rhythmic pattern and other times with a looped sound, and it stays right where it is for five or six or seven minutes. Elements come and go, emerging as though they’ve floated up to the surface of a pond, but they don’t change the piece’s momentum or divert it. It’s sometimes hard to know why they’ve arrived when they do, or why they’ve gone away afterward.

The tracks on 1996’s Ch-Vox (originally released on Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label, later reissued by Warp) are darker and even more minimal than the ones on Succour. A piece might only contain two or three elements, repeating in subtly variant patterns. The mix is full of hiss and low, ominous rumbles; it reminds me of Mick Harris’s work as Scorn and Lull. The title piece, “Hive” and “Ashdecon” sound like collages of recordings made inside a submarine on the brink of implosion. This is not a fun record; it’s something you listen to on headphones in the dark to inspire unsettling dreams.

Seefeel more or less disappeared after Ch-Vox. Clifford went on to make electronic music as Disjecta, while Peacock, Darren Seymor and Justin Fletcher became the band Scala. They reunited and released a self-titled album in 2010 (I haven’t heard it) and have occasionally played live, as recently as 2019. And now they’re back again, with a six-track EP, Everything Squared, and rumors of a full-length coming in 2025. My friend Ned Raggett interviewed Mark Clifford for The Quietus; in that piece, he (Clifford) explains that the EP is basically his work, with a few contributions from Peacock and some new faces.

“I was finalizing these particular tracks [in 2019] but we were already in a point where we couldn’t really meet up anyway, and [Peacock] had moved to Berlin. Pretty much everything since then, I’ve basically gone down my own path; Sarah basically leaves it to me. [She’s] happy to come and do a few bits of vocals and then allow me to fit them into the tracks or mess around with them. It’s like a one man project, the EP, apart from the bass where [Shigeru Ishihara] did contribute when he came to the UK the last time I saw him.”

The music mostly sounds like their earlier stuff to me, closer to Succour than Ch-Vox. Peacock’s vocals are more prominent on tracks like “Sky Hooks” and “Multifolds” than they were on the group’s final album; at times, actual words can be made out!

It will be easy for longtime fans to say “It’s like they never left”, but that’s not quite true. There are small, subtle production touches that suggest an awareness of what’s been going on in the realm of dark, gloomy British electronic music while they’ve been away. “Antiskeptic” may remind some listeners of Burial or other artists on the Hyperdub label. And the music was mastered by Stefan Betke, who makes his own music as Pole, so it has the amniotic warmth of dub techno at times. Indeed, some of the more minimal tracks here, like “Hooked Paw” and “Multifolds,” could easily appear on a Macro Dub Infection compilation, were a third volume in that legendary series to emerge.

If you’ve never listened to Seefeel, Rupt + Flex 94-96 is your first stop. If you find yourself as enraptured by that set as I was, Everything Squared is a nice little bonus.

That’s it for now. See you next week!