Futurism Restated #79: Seefeel Return (Again! At Last!)
Mark Clifford on hiatuses, comebacks, and the group’s triumphant new mini-LP
Seefeel are survivors. Yet they’ve also never really gotten their due, as far as I’m concerned. The group—originally Mark Clifford, Sarah Peacock, Justin Fletcher, and Daren Seymour—got their start in a very different era, making a mixture of shoegaze and electronic music that never quite attracted the acclaim of other shoegaze bands (even if Aphex Twin’s remixes of their 1993 single “Time to Find Me” would go on to become classics). They signed first to Too Pure, home at the time to acts like Stereolab, Moonshake, and PJ Harvey, and released one album there, 1993’s Quique (pronounced “kick”), before jumping to Warp, where they became known as the first guitar band to sign to what was, at the time, still associated primarily with the leftfield electronica of artists like Aphex Twin and Autechre. But then a funny thing happened: Rather than emphasizing the shoegaze elements of their sound, they stripped their music down to its atmospheric essence on their second album, 1995’s Succour.
I still remember buying Succour, which I picked up at Providence’s Fast Forward (the same shop that introduced me to Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, Autechre’s Amber, and countless other records of the period, and without which I would not be half the listener I am today). The Designers Republic sleeve caught my eye, and the sounds within held my ear. The album’s ambient tracks remain some of the loneliest pieces of music ever set to tape—little more than strands of guitar feedback wafting like curls of smoke against the inky, inky black. There’s a tenuous link to Quique in Peacock’s wordlessly ethereal vocals, but just barely; the drums, meanwhile, are a kind of industrial dub. It’s a singular album, varied enough to keep you guessing, but always pointing inward. There’s nothing else like it. The penultimate track, “Utreat,” is among the most heartbreakingly beautiful pieces of music I’ve ever heard.
With 1996’s (Ch-Vox)—released on Aphex Twin’s Rephlex—they stripped their sound down even further, muting the beats and accentuating the soft-focus guitar feedback. And then, as though making good on the spirit of dissolution in the music, Seefeel simply disappeared. Fletcher, Seymour, and Peacock went on to form the darkly dramatic Scala, with Mark Van Hoen; Clifford busied himself with the angular, abstract techno of Disjecta.
Seefeel regrouped in 2010—now just Clifford and Peacock, abetted by drummer Iida Kazuhisa (Boredoms) and bassist Shigeru Ishihara (aka DJ Scotch Egg)—to release the Faults EP and then, in 2011, the album Seefeel. I’ll admit that I didn’t pay close attention at the time. I think, looking back, that the reunion era hadn’t really kicked off yet; without really devoting much thought to it, I wondered what a long-dormant group with a heavily revamped lineup could bring to the table, so many years later. Today, that strikes me as an incredibly blinkered and incurious perspective; I’m embarrassed by my knee-jerk dismissal. It’s not my favorite of Seefeel’s albums, but still, it has plenty to offer on its own terms. It would be a full decade before Seefeel surfaced again, this time with the 4CD anthology Rupt + Flex 1994 - 1996, covering Succour, (Ch-Vox), and selected outtakes from the period. (I reviewed it, rapturously, for Pitchfork.)
Now, just three years after that, Seefeel (now just Clifford and Peacock, assisted on two tracks by Ishihara) are back again with Everything Squared, a six-track mini-album. The great surprise this time is how absolutely classic they sound. It’s a sparse, stripped-back sound woven together out of gossamer filaments of feedback and Peacock’s ethereal voice; it feels like a continuation of what they were doing on Succour, at times with hints of Quique woven in—and yet, most amazingly still, it never sounds like they’re trying to reclaim old glories or retrace their steps. It simply sounds timeless, which is also to say that it sounds current. It sounds like Seefeel, which is also to say that it sounds like no one else on earth.
I’d never spoken to any members of the group before, though I’d traded the occasional DM with Clifford, who was kind enough to send me one of his lesser-known Disjecta releases a few years ago. But with one of my lifelong favorite groups making such a triumphant return to form, I knew that it was well past time to interview him.
We spoke for an hour about the new release, the reasons for their hiatuses and their comebacks, Clifford’s many side projects (including a 1999 trip-hop project I was unaware of until this week), and more. Best of all is the news that Clifford is working on another Seefeel album that will hopefully see the light of day next year; with luck, fans won’t need to wait another decade for the project’s next dispatch.
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Scroll on for the full interview.
Futurism Restated: Extended hiatuses and unexpected comebacks have become par for the course in recent years—Aphex Twin did it, My Bloody Valentine did it, Slowdive did it—but you guys have been doing it longer than others. You let 15 years go by between (Ch-Vox) in 1996 and Seefeel in 2011, and then another 13 years until now. What have you been doing in the meantime, and what brought Seefeel back together again?
Mark Clifford: It’s not like we ever stopped—or I don’t, anyway. As a band, we don’t really stop, I just have a problem with putting things into groups. I’m making all the time, and there’s thousands and thousands of potential Seefeel tracks. My problem is unless I’ve got the sound of an album, I’m not happy with them. So in all these years since 1993 we probably could have released albums quite regularly, but for me, they wouldn’t have been unified works, they would have been collections of tracks. I don’t know what the currency of albums is; they’re not what people are looking for, so much, so I think albums have to have something special to make them worthwhile. So that’s even more in my head now, of having to have something, a reason why this is an album and not just a bunch of tracks that people can pick from. There could have been a lot more releases, and in fact there’s been times when I thought about putting out endless EPs, because I’ve often had four or five tracks which I’ve liked together, but not an hour’s worth of music.
This is short for an album—it’s six tracks and 26 minutes long. (Ch-Vox) was also relatively short as albums go. Do you find that you like to work in that shorter format?
I find it more comfortable in some ways, yeah. Both of those releases, (Ch-Vox) and Everything Squared, were really supposed to be EPs originally. (Ch-Vox) came about because when Richard [James, aka Aphex Twin] did the “Time to Find Me” remix for us, he didn’t want any money for it, he just said, “Can you do an EP for Rephlex?” So that was the trade-off.
That’s a very good trade-off!
It was for us, yeah, I’m not so sure for Richard. [Laughs] But that was supposed to be an EP, and it turned into something a little bit longer. It’s the same with Everything Squared: It was originally four tracks, and it was going to very low key, almost as a kind of back end to the [Rupt and Flex] reissues, almost like a way of pushing the reissues again. Then it grew into a six-track, and then it grew into a slightly, let’s push this a little bit more, and there were a lot more tracks—there are other tracks which will probably be put out at some point. So it could have been an album, to be honest with you. There were I think about 15 or 20 tracks, originally.
Wow.
A lot of them are very abstract. Those are the more solid tracks that ended up on the record. There’s a lot of little noodly instrumental pieces.
I always like your noodly pieces! I’m sad they didn’t make it into the final cut.
I am too, but Warp like precision. They don’t like noodles.
So some of that is Warp’s say-so.
Yes, I tend to trust the people I work with at Warp. You know, they do this as a job, so if they say it’s better to release six solid tracks, I’m happy to go with them, because they know what they’re doing. I’m sure you know—it’s the same thing with writing or any artistic endeavor, it’s very difficult to hear it or read it how someone else would interpret it, so you have to trust other people sometimes. I think that’s something I’ve been very bad at over the years, not being prepared to let go and listen to other people. Which is another reason my output’s been so low. As you get older, you realize that you can’t have these extended periods [without releasing music] all the time, because in another 15 years I’ll be in a wheelchair or something! So it’s really made me think that I need to trust other people if I want to keep releasing music. I need to be more trusting of other people’s opinions.
When did Everything Squared start coming together? If you have a continuous stretch of material you’ve been making, was it the reissues that sparked this idea of, like, Oh, we could put out new material as well?
I think it was the catalyst. The tracks were written around 2018, 2019, so they’re already quite old. They were effectively shelved—also, because everything that happened in 2020, 2021, everything got a bit weird, anyway. The reissues were supposed to come out in 2019 and then they got pushed back because of the problems. After the reissues, I think Matthew at Warp just said, “Let’s put something out,” and those were the tracks that were kind of done as a group. I was happy with them all—they felt finished, they felt completed. I always know if I go back to a bunch of tracks and I don’t want to mess with them, they’re done. If part of me wants to change something, then I know I have to stop myself, or I’m going to end up trashing the whole thing.
Aside from them being done—which is of course a good place to start!—what holds them together for you as an album? You said you don’t like putting things out unless there’s a throughline that holds them together. What makes them cohesive to you?
There were four tracks that were always in a group, and always worked really well; one of them didn’t end up on the EP, but that will probably come out separately at some point. I don’t really know what it was about them, they just all seemed to bounce off each other really nicely. I think because they had a similar flow in terms of rhythm, but a different top end. What I liked about it as well is they had shades of old Seefeel but also shades of new Seefeel. I was really aware of that at the time—because the reissues were coming out, I wanted to try and bring together all the elements of Seefeel. Somehow it was a lot easier in my head than it was in reality.
It’s funny, because the first thing that struck me is how consistent it is with your previous material. In some ways it sounds more like the Succour era than it does like the 2011 album, and there are even bits of the earlier Too Pure stuff in there. But you also don’t sound like you’re repeating yourself; I don’t get the sense, like, Oh, they’re trying to go back to this old sound. It just feels very natural.
Yeah, I hate going back, so it was just essentially like trying to hint at it a little bit. But also, when you’re doing reissues all the time, you’re immersed in your own music and it’s bound to have an effect on the way you remember that you were good at certain things. It’s very easy to forget that you were good at something years and years ago, and then when you dig out all these unheard tracks, you think, Oh, OK, I quite like this sound, maybe we can work on a little bit of that. Succour were the reissues were were doing for Warp, so obviously it’s got a lot of that slightly more moody, dark sound to it, I think.
Right, and very ethereal—I mean, Sarah’s voice is very, yeah, ethereal, sort of colored smoke floating over the ruins.
Yeah, I like that, that’s good. [Laughs]
Has the way that you work changed much in the past decade or so?
I wouldn’t say fundamentally. Obviously, the technology is improving. It’s just incomparably better, even since 2011, and certainly since the days when we used tape and spliced things with razors. I mean, it was painful making music back then. Id didn’t seem like it, because we had no reference. But a few years ago, Sarah actually brought her Atari for an experiment. We were going to try and write a track like we used to, using an Atari ST and Cubase. We gave up after about half an hour! It was awful. It was unreal that we ever made music using equipment like that. Especially now, with how fast computers are, and how stable music software is, I can do so much that I couldn’t do back then. Because everything’s so much quicker, I can try ideas and it not be painful. That’s definitely helped with this music—it has more layers and more things going on, because I can try things without it taking two hours.
For your raw materials, are you continuing to work primarily with guitar?
Yeah, guitar and vocal. As always, you know, I sample it, it’s all completely messed around with. But also with rhythms, I’ve tried to make the rhythm sounds a little bit more as well, rather than using samples. So on Quique, there’s a drum machine; Succour had samples off various sample discs. But I’ve tried to create my own sounds for the rhythm, mostly. The kick is the one exception.
What’s the division of labor like between you and Sarah?
Sarah’s much happier to come in and almost like jam some vocals, and for me to do whatever I want with them. That’s what she said a few years ago, just do whatever you want with them. In the past, she could almost get quite upset about me sampling her vocals and pitching them. I remember when I first played her “Spangle” she really didn’t like it, she didn’t like what I’d done to her voice. Now she loves it. I think she appreciates that it works. Sarah, you know, Sarah has her own life, she’s quite busy, so I think she’s happy to supply the raw material and allow me to just kind of go with it. So often the vocals won’t even be written for that particular track, they’ll come from something else.
When you guys are in the studio together and sort of jamming away, I guess, do you have a sort of skeleton of a backing track and she’s improvising to that?
Yeah, exactly. I like working like that with her because sometimes with Sarah, I think the less she thinks about it, the more she just does it, the more little quirks of sound you get from her voice. She’s got a very tonal voice, so when she just tries things without thinking about it too much, you get little strange nuances in her voice that maybe she wouldn’t think about doing otherwise.
That’s interesting. When I think of her voice I almost think of shapes, more than anything. I mean, obviously, because it’s nonverbal, but there are lots of small glissandi and sort of glancing accents. It would be hard to plot her notes on a stave.
It’s funny, there’s a guy I used to know, years ago, called Ambrose, and he came to my house once when I was making music. He trained at the Royal College of Music, and he could not get his head around the chords I was using. He just looked so confused. I’m not trained in music, so to me, it’s just natural, it’s just by ear. I would love to see our music notated. Not that it would mean anything, because I wouldn’t be able to read it anyway. You know, people like Richard [James] have had their music done by orchestras, because he’s very musical. Sarah is quite a good musician, actually, but she doesn’t do it on Seefeel.
When you’re composing, when you’re making music, how much are you building up and how much are you stripping away? Because when I listen to Seefeel, especially this latest record, I really feel like I’m listening to the remnants of something that has been almost entirely erased. There’s a sort of absence, like there used to be other things there and they’re all gone.
That’s quite perceptive, I would say. Yeah, the tracks weren’t quick, most of them. Like, “Spangle” was done in one night—a few hours, that track. That’s not the way these tracks were. We used to have to work quickly. Now, obviously, with technology, it’s much more open, so there’s been various incarnations of each track, with the exception maybe of “Multifolds.” “Multifolds” pretty much sounds like it did from the start—a bit smoother, maybe. But “Skyhooks,” for example, the actual track hasn’t really changed much at all, but a lot of stuff was taken out or filtered out. You can probably hear that there’s a lot of filtering going on underneath where sounds were reduced by using filters and that kind of thing, so things are coming in and out. So that’s quite perceptive of you. There’s quite a lot going on, but you just keep on moving in and out, and you can’t actually hear it all, it disappears sometimes and then comes back in.
You’ve got Shigeru Ishihara, aka DJ Scotch Egg, playing bass on two tracks.
That was basically the last thing he really did in Seefeel, because then he moved to Berlin, and because of COVID, I didn’t see him for another two years. Those two tracks were another stopping point for me, personally. I loved working with Shige. When he went to Berlin and suddenly couldn’t come over here because of flying, we tried to do it a little bit by email, but it’s never quite the same as having someone there. So that was another frustration that caused a delay in the EP, because I wanted him to do more bass on some other tracks.
I find it funny that he plays with you guys, because his music as Scotch Egg is so completely different.
I know, it’s crazy. When he first joined—because I knew Iida [Kazuhisa, who played drums on 2011’s Seefeel] before, and when I was looking for a bass player, Iida daid, Oh, I know someone, Shige. And I was like, who’s Shige? He said, Do you remember, we saw DJ Scotch Egg? And I was like, that guy? But then he came to the first rehearsal and within half an hour I was blown away by him. Just the sounds he was making on his bass were extraordinary, I’ve never heard anyone do what he was doing on a bass before. Not in terms of wiggly rubbish, but just in terms of knowing how to make a bass sound good.
“Multifolds” was the first one he did. I really liked the track, and he came along and did it here, in headphones, actually. He just put that almost footwork kind of bassline down, that kind of stuttery [ba ba ba]... and it was done. I just knew that was it, first take. I just knew that it was done. He’s a really remarkable musician, Shige. He’s on “Sky Hooks” as well, which is essentially the same bassline, but it just works on both of them. It’s funny, because it’s pretty much the same bassline, but it sounds quite different on both tracks.
Where does the title Everything Squared come from?
I’m not sure, because I wrote it down a long time ago. I tutor maths, sometimes, maths and English, and I think it’s something one of my students said, which is why I made note of it. I think we were talking about indices, and they said, “What, everything squared?” And I just thought it sounded really nice. It seemed to fit in with the mathematical, kind of, artwork with Succour, but also somehow—I can’t even explain why it seems to fit with the trajectory of Seefeel, it just feels like it does somehow. Maybe all our problems are squared as well. I don’t know, it just sounded good, and we kept coming back to it as a title, which is a good sign. When you keep coming back to the same thing, you think, it kind of works. It kind of means nothing and it means something at the same time.
I wanted to go back in time a little bit. I’m interested in the shift that happened between 1993 and 1995. At first you were on Too Pure, which was associated with artists like PJ Harvey and Stereolab, and you were sort of lumped in with this shoegaze and post-rock scene, and then very quickly you turned up on Warp with, to me, a somewhat different sound, though I don’t know if you would see it the same way, with “Starethrough” and Succour. Did you feel like you were a part of any particular scene with either records, or did you think you were out in the wilderness doing your own thing? Because that period is such a transitional moment, especially in the UK.
With Quique, we definitely felt more isolated, like we were kind of doing something on our own. Because like you said, Too Pure—I mean, we knew the people at Too Pure, like Moonshake and Stereolab and Th’ Faith Healers. But when you were just saying those names…
Right, Th’ Faith Healers—and Seefeel?
Yeah, it’s nuts. We actually did a show with the Voodoo Queens, if you can believe that. So we didn’t feel part of a community. I think with Warp, we definitely did, as with Warp, we were with, like, Aphex and Autechre, and we definitely were friends and hung out—you know, playing baseball, even, that kind of stuff, or rounders, as we call it. So it was definitely like you were part of a family at Warp. That wasn’t the case at Too Pure. I never felt much connection with the other artists. That’s not saying I didn’t love them—some of those records, like PJ Harvey, Dry is one of my favorite records. I love some of the music that comes out of Too Pure. But it wasn’t the kind of camaraderie, or the sense that you’re on a mission together or anything like that. On Warp, there definitely was, there was a sense that you’re part of a movement.
A shared sense of purpose, maybe.
That’s right, yeah.
Were you guys raving and clubbing in that era? Because obviously Warp came from rave and club roots, but by 1995, they had also moved into a different realm that was kind of the Warp universe, with one foot in the club world, but also not.
Yeah, definitely, in ’91, ’92, going to clubs and the ecstasy scene or whatever definitely influenced Quique. I’m going to get into trouble saying that, but yeah, there was definitely a lot of that going on, which is why Quique’s got that brightness. It just comes from spending so much time off your face, basically, and then when you’re not, and you’re more reflective and actually making music, it seeps into what you’re doing.
When we moved to Warp, I think that had changed already. We weren’t going to those kinds of clubs, and I think some of the optimism had gone out of that scene as well. There was a very kind of brave new world about the early ’90s for a while. Even things like football hooliganism died out because of that scene. You know, there were people wanting to go out and just be happy, and obviously it’s drug fueled. Which is why it ended, because it wasn’t real, essentially. So I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all the artists went slightly darker at that point, maybe. Not just us.
I was about to ask if you were on the Isolation compilation and now I’m looking at Discogs and I see that in fact you were. I see you guys as being so representative of that—even though isolationism wasn’t even a sound, really, it was an invention of Kevin Martin, I guess. But I see you and especially Succour as being the epitome as that very lonely sort of sound.
Yeah. Slightly disappointed. Like things haven’t quite worked out and you’ve decided, right, I’m not participating in the world anymore because it’s only going to let you down.
I think also moving to Warp, I probably didn’t realize it at the time, but it probably had an effect on me mentally, that I was on an electronic label. I think that probably put a little bit of pressure on me. Not that the label—they wanted a guitar band, but I think, you know, you want to fit in a little bit. And I think that definitely affected the way I worked at that time.
What do you think of the recent shoegaze revival? Have you seen a boost in your numbers from Quique?
I wouldn’t say I’ve seen a massive boost. I mean, even when we’re doing nothing, our records seem to kind of still… we still get royalties. I don’t really ask for numbers. I haven’t seen a spike, if that’s what you mean. We always get lumped in with shoegaze, but we don’t get any of the benefit of it. [Laughs]
That’s what I was wondering, exactly.
We’re shoegaze, but too difficult. [Laughs] But it is funny how massive that’s become for certain bands—Slowdive, for example. In fact, the guy who does our social media is a really nice guy called Dan Ainslie. He’s been doing our social media for years. He set up a MySpace page back in the day and we had no social media. And I remember going onto MySpace and looking at all these different Seefeel sites, and it was like, oh, all these people have set up Seefeel fan sites, but his was way, way superior. He had so many followers on there. So we said, do you want to make this official? And then he eventually did our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all of them. But he’s also a hairdresser. And he said he was cutting someone’s hair a couple of weeks go. The kid was young, and the kid started telling him about the shoegaze band he’d started.
Wow.
And it was so lambasted here [in the UK]—that’s the thing! Shoegaze became the butt of all jokes in the ’90s.
I think for an American, that’s something that’s hard to understand, because we didn’t have that sort of baggage, unless you were regularly sort of reading NME and Melody Maker and stuff. But the name itself is derogatory, right? I mean, you’re staring at your feet.
Yeah. But in America, it’s almost the opposite. It’s a positive thing. It’s like, it’s a cool thing.
So you guys toured with the Cocteau Twins in ’94 or so. What were those crowds like? What was it like playing Seefeel for Cocteau Twins fans?
Oh, it was great. The tour was just the right size. The venues weren’t so massive. I was talking to a friend about this—do you know Fujiya and Miyagi? They supported New Order. And I think that when you’re supporting a band that’s that massive, the support slot becomes quite difficult, actually. It’s not gonna have the same impact. I think Cocteau Twins, fortunately, weren’t that massive. It was intimate enough that fans could still enjoy our set. They weren’t just sitting there waiting for Cocteau Twins to come on. So we still got a fair listen, I think. Which is not always true with support bands. I think a lot of the time people are just there to see the main act and the support band is a bit of a kind of nuisance, almost.
I think we were worried that we were just gonna be seen as these upstarts. You know, when are the Cocteau Twins coming on? But it was great, yeah. And they were great as well.
Then you went on to remix them, and you had a pretty significant relationship with them in some ways.
It’s so weird how these things have come to us. I actually sent a CD to Elizabeth [Fraser]—the first Seefeel EP, More Like Space—saying how much that they’d inspired us. I didn’t expect to hear anything back. But Robin got in touch with this letter in gothic print—I had it framed for a while. It was just so weird, because when I was like 12, 13, if you’d asked me what would be a highlight of your career, it would have been working with the Cocteau Twins. They were absolute idols of mine. Ever since I read Robin in an interview say that he hated people who played more than three strings on the guitar…
You took off three strings.
Yeah, yeah. But it felt really natural, though. That’s the thing. I didn’t feel starstruck with them, because they’re actually very down-to-earth people. They’re not walking on clouds of ice and, you know, wearing long white robes. So it was really easy working with them. They’re the nicest people.
I got to interview Simon and Robin a few months ago, and it was amazing. It was one of those pinch-yourself moments, because for me it was the same—from the age of about 14 they were just the top for me. And they were such lovely people.
Was Robin being cheeky? Robin is brutally honest—he’ll tell you exactly what he thinks about you or anything you do. I like people like that.
So what happened after (Ch-Vox)? From an outside perspective, it seems like Seefeel went dark.
There’d always been a little bit of tension in the band. I don’t think it was the main reason. I think probably the main reason was that the others were feeling like they wanted to express themselves a bit more. They had done a couple of tracks for Succour, and they just didn’t fit, for me, anyway—they were so different to the rest of the album. So I think they got a bit frustrated and wanted to do their own project, which is what they did, obviously, with Scala. That’s my memory of it. We didn’t, we never said, oh, that’s it. I hate you, we’re splitting up. It was never like that.
More like—after Succour, I wanted to go straight back into the studio and do another record. I was happy with Succour, but I knew it was not a commercial album for Warp. We actually had a five-album deal with Warp then, so I wanted to get through those albums and be productive. But I remember Justin [Fletcher] saying, look, we just want to do our own record right now. And everything just drifted then, I suppose. They went off to do their own record and I just thought, okay, I’ll do some… I don’t know what I’ll do. I’m a terrible drifter, if I’m not given a framework. I’m not a career musician in the sense that I’m not very focused. I still treat music like a hobby. To be honest with you, I don’t really think of pounds signs, which I probably should do, you know. I don’t treat it like a business like I probably should do. I’m trying to be more like that at the moment and release more music and be more productive. So I guess that’s what happened. We did actually have a couple of sessions. We had a session in ’97 and one in ’99, and some tracks did come out of those which haven’t been released and I’m sure at some point we’ll probably do something with them. There’s nothing exceptional about them—I think Seefeel fans will love them; they sound like “Spangle” and all the nice things about Seefeel. They’re not bad tracks, but maybe there wasn’t the kind of spark there that we all know you need to feel like you’re doing something special; otherwise it doesn’t feel like it’s worth just banging on it.
So it just became a long break for no apparent reason. The only reason we got back together was because 4AD reissued Quique in 2007. They asked me and Sarah to do a couple of interviews, so we went to Beggars’ office to do some interviews, and we just started saying, Oh, let’s do some more music. We probably could have got in contact and done that five years before, to be honest with you. But this is very typical of Seefeel, we need to be corralled together. We probably should have had a manager, to be absolutely honest—that’s always what’s been missing with Seefeel, is a manager to kick us into gear and say, look, get on with it, do something.
So both reunion or comeback albums, or whatever you want to call them, were really spurred by the reissues, then.
I guess it’s just being put into that frame of mind and suddenly thinking, OK, well, seeing as I’m doing all of this work, we might as well put out something new as well. Obviously, Steve [Beckett] coming to our show at Warp 20 in Paris and asking us to do a new record for Warp, that’s the spur you need. We played Warp 20 in Paris, and after the show, Steve looked really overjoyed. The first thing he said was, you’ve got to do another record for us. That actually hadn’t occurred to me that both reunions or resurgences were the result of reissues.
So are we going to have to wait for an Everything Squared reissue to get you back together again in another 12 or 13 years?
No, I just can’t do that anymore. [Laughs] The extra tracks will have to come out quickly—I can’t wait 30 years to do the redux version of Everything Squared. Maybe I’ll still be on this planet, but maybe not. I’m certainly not going to have the energy to go through all the old hard discs.
What was the experience like in putting together Rupt and Flex, of going through all the old material and selecting outtakes for the discs?
It’s funny how tracks which at the time I thought were too much like someone else, or I thought they were unfinished sounding, suddenly become quite interesting documents, even though they weren’t completed. They still carry a memory for me. I can almost remember each thing about doing it and where I was. I remember that this one was done in the front room of my flat, and this one was when I’d moved the studio to the back of the flat—little things like that. It’s a bit like looking at a photo album.
I was really interested in some of the alternate takes because some are literally just different speeds, like faster or slower.
One of the frustrating things about going through tracks for the reissue was that a track like “Rupt,” there’s about 30 or 45 different mixes of it, all of which were kind of—this is the last mix, this is the last mix. There were four different mixing sessions and there’s hardly a difference between each one. It’s crazy. You’re listening to them and after about the fifth one, you’re going, I can’t do this anymore, I can’t hear any difference in these. But at the time, I must have been hearing huge differences in the hi-hat level or something like that.
“This is unacceptable!”
It’s nuts how time flattens these things out.
I’ve always been curious to open (Ch-Vox) with a version of “Utreat,” which was on Succour as well. What made you put “Utreat (Complete)” on (Ch-Vox) and how is that version different?
It’s not much different, I think. It started off almost like (Ch-Vox) carries on from Succour, like if you had them on tracing paper, they would kind of overlap there. But it also became a bit of a joke that we were releasing it as a single, because it’s the least single-like track on the album. At that time, I think I thought that that version was very different to the one on the album. Again, in retrospect, it probably isn’t. I like (Ch-Vox), but I do wish we’d spent a little bit more time on doing a more proper album for them. Side two is more like I think the whole thing should have sounded.
That all came out of the same sessions as Succour, right?
Basically, yeah, or just after.
It’s funny, because I got (Ch-Vox) when it came out and at the time it didn’t click with me. Succour has been one of my favorite albums ever since the day I bought it, shortly after it came out in 1995, and somehow (Ch-Vox) just didn’t grab me. I never went back to it. Then when Rupt and Flex came out, I was like, what the hell was wrong with me? This is a great record. If anything, (Ch-Vox) distilled all the elements that I loved about Succour. Somehow it took all those years for it to make sense for me. It’s funny, and kind of humbling.
I’ve heard that from other people as well. I think maybe it’s just the shock factor when a band you really like releases something quite different. I’ve done this with Sonic Youth before, with the SYR stuff. You’re really excited and you get it and it’s like, OK, this just sounds like they’re throwing stuff at me.
Right. “Where’s the riffs?”
Yeah, where’s the structure? And then you listen to it again, and you think, this is brilliant. You get it. It’s just not a whole band, it’s them doing what they do in a more abstract way.
What happened to Disjecta? You put out those two records in 1995 and 1996, kind of in parallel with the Succour and (Ch-Vox) era, and then you dusted it off for an EP in 2003. Did you just feel like you had done what you wanted to do with that project?
Yeah, Disjecta was never meant to be a serious project. It was really me just hearing things I liked in other people’s music and learning from it. There are certain tracks which were written for that record which I think are the best ones, because I wrote them for the album. Steve wanted to release a solo album of mine because he had no more Seefeel. He said, have you got any solo stuff? So I sent him these tracks, and he liked them and wanted to put them out, so I wrote some more to fill up the album. I think the more interesting songs—I can’t remember the titles, but there’s one which has got all this phasing, these kind of scattery rhythms with phasing all over them. It’s cool. I haven’t listened to that record for such a long time, but there were some more interesting tracks, which I think if I’d just done those, I’d be more interested in that chapter. Some of the more poppy stuff I instantaneously regretted doing. I almost immediately wiped it from my mind, I think.
I can’t recall anything I’d call poppy on Disjecta.
I can’t remember the title—it’s about the third or fourth track on the album. It reminds me a little bit of Plaid or something. But this is to my brain. I think people took it very seriously and it wasn’t meant to be. It was meant to be a fun album, it wasn’t supposed to be a statement. I think I got a little bit kind of overwhelmed by people taking it apart and analyzing it, because it wasn’t written like that. And it kind of put me off releasing my own music for quite a long time after that. It’s one thing to be analyzed when you’re in a band where you have a support network around you. As a solo artist, it’s hard when people start picking apart your personal music. You’re very vulnerable somehow. I’ve got so much respect for solo artists.
Did you get that from reviews of the record?
The reviews were mostly good, but people were comparing it to Seefeel, which felt unfair because Seefeel’s a different thing.
I’ve always loved the Disjecta stuff. It was really fundamental to me in that period where I was just discovering electronic music. I still keep some of those tracks on hand for DJ sets*, actually.
People have asked if there’s more. There’s so much Disjecta stuff as well that wasn’t released, because when I wasn’t doing Seefeel, that’s what I carried on doing, essentially. And it mutated and mutated. There was a point in 1999 where it became like a dub project. And that stuff is good. That’s the one thing I could have released at the time which I never gave to Warp. There’s about 25 or 30 tracks which work together really well.
Have you considered putting that out?
The thing is, to me now, it sounds like it’s lost its moment a little bit. I have thought about maybe at one point when I’ve got time, just reworking the tracks into something new, because it’s mainly the basslines, I really like the basslines on them. There’s not a lot going on above, just little sparky kinds of sounds and modulated guitar sounds which come in and out. I might one day flesh them out and rework them and tidy it up a little bit. I think it would sound a little bit too weak as it is, just compared to how music sounds now.
Do you have any other side projects now? I know you and Loops Haunt were doing Oto Hiax. Is that ongoing?
We have talked about doing some more stuff. Again, it’s just time. And I have lots of other things which I really want to put out as other projects. I’ve been working on a new Seefeel album, and from that, some quite aggressive rhythmic tracks have come out which I’d like to release as a different project one day.
Not Seefeel.
Not Seefeel. It could go under Seefeel, but it’s slightly too—not full on, but too sparse. It’s very difficult to put vocals on it for a start, because it’s very, very minimal. It’s rhythm-heavy and there’s no hooks for Sarah to sing to, so it would just end up being like bits of vocal coming in all the time, which would get tedious after a bit, I think. But as instrumental tracks, they kind of work. So yeah, I do intend to be more productive. I’ve been really trying to remind myself that I have so much music that I might as well do something with it, right? It’s nonsense to just have it on a hard drive until I die and someone goes, oh, what’s all of this? My nephew probably, because he’s involved in the music industry. So I’m going to leave my catalog to him. He’ll know what to do with it. [Laughs]
I wasn’t aware until this morning that you had a trip-hop project called Sneakster back in 1999.
Yeah, that’s another thing I’ve tried to erase from my memory. It started off as a good idea and ended up for me as a disaster. Because the original tracks were really skeletal and almost like R&B is now—really stripped-down rhythms, hard percussive sounds. Sophie [Hinkley] had this beautiful voice over the top, and it had these ambient guitar sounds. Bella Union wanted to release it, put us into [the Cocteau Twins’] September Sound studio, and I just got carried away with all the gear and it transformed into this kind of horrible dirge. This is my problem. I can so easily just go off on one and then regret it two years later. I almost instantaneously regretted it, as soon as it came out.
You guys are playing Bristol with A.R. Kane soon. Will you be touring the new record?
I hope so, next year. We do plan to do a proper album next year at some point, if all goes well. There’s lots of places we haven’t played that we need to go and play. Obviously it depends on the other members of the band. Sarah doesn’t find touring and playing live that easy, so she’s got to be up for it. But I want to. Something will happen, even if it’s just a dub set. We have talked about that in the past—we used to do mixing sets, where it would just be mixing off the tape. I’ve talked about doing that live, a kind of AV show where it’s more like a virtual band. With technology now, every gig would be so completely different.
That would be really cool. Just dubbing out the multi-tracks?
I’m aware that people do like to see the band members, but just as a different experience, I think it would be quite interesting.
I’ve been meaning to ask—where are you right now, are you in your home studio?
At home, yes, It’s not a studio in the sense that I can ramp up the volume very much, but I make almost all my music here. I have to mix outside of home, though, because I tend to use headphones most of the time, which is not ideal for mixing. I’ve sent some demos to Warp and the bass is so heavy on it, because everything is leveled nicely in my headphones. They get it and it’s just all bass.
That’s funny. It’s the opposite problem you used to have—I was reading an interview, I think it might have been Sarah saying this, that back in the Too Pure days, you guys were on a television show, and the bass was completely inaudible, because the speakers on television sets in the ’90s were so trebly.
It was the first Warp release, “Starethrough.” It was sandwiched in between Suede and another indie band. So they were really brilliant, and then ours came on and it was so compressed, it was just like a little faint sound. It was great. I mean, I guess it stood out, which is what you want, right?
That’s all for this week—thanks for reading!
* In fact, I included a choice Disjecta cut—along with a Seefeel fave!—in a special IDM set recorded for New York’s Public Records in May 2020, at the peak of the pandemic; I recently re-upped that set for paying subscribers as part of Mixes Digest #4.
A great interview. And I LOVE the new Seefeel record.
Excellent interview! They've always been so mysterious to me because of their silence, but cool to see they're just normal people who struggle with finding the time to do things (ha, don't we all!)
I stumbled across Seefeel a few years ago and 'Quique' really changed my ears (also, same as above--never knew how to pronounce that). I'm also a hug fan of their first two EPs, 'More Like Space' and 'Starethrough.' I know they didn't want to be lumped in with the shoegaze thing, but to my ears at least, they were doing such innovative stuff compared to a lot of bands of that era, namely Seefeel GROOVES. holy moley these songs groove, especially on a good system. So glad to hear their new record, and glad to get some context!