Nothing is ever completed in a Seefeel music. There isn’t any remaining end result—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 would 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 music is sort of a snapshot of the increasing cosmos at an arbitrary level in its evolution, a thumbnail picture of infinity.
Through the years, the UK group—at the moment the duo of Peacock and producer/multi-instrumentalist Mark Clifford—has provided clues as to the character, if not the causes, of its cosmological dub. The 1995 music “Utreat,” the loneliest and most minimalist factor Seefeel had but created, stretched like a bridge from the ultimate aspect of Succour to the opening of the next yr’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 classes for each albums, gathering a number of variations that knocked acquainted kinds out of their identified orbits. A drum half would possibly lurch to the fore, or be swallowed into the space; a smudge of outdated suggestions would possibly draw novel shapes towards the black. In a number of instances, the band appeared merely to be toying with the playback velocity—gradual, slower, slowest—and coaxing new frequencies out of the tape with each cross.
Squared Roots affords the clearest image but—nicely, besides that the images are blurred virtually 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 document 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; the whole lot 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 unimaginable to explain with any type 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?