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█ █ P U B L I C . S O U N D
█ █
█ █ presenting our latest release
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r e l e a s e . i n f o
Artist.....: Seefeel
Title......: Quique (Redux Edition)
Rip Date...: Sep-2007 Cat.No.....: PURE 194
Style......: Electronic Label......: Too Pure
Quality....: VBRkbps Type.......: Album
Size.......: 159,6 MB Source.....: CDDA
r e l e a s e . n o t e s
Genre: Electronic, Rock
Style: Dub, Techno, Shoegazer
Disc #1: Contains the original album completely remastered.
Original sound recording made by Too Pure, London.
Remastered at Loud.
Disc #2: Contains rare and previously unreleased Seefeel material.
2-2 previously released on Water & Architecture.
2-3 previously released on i-01.
2-4 previously released on Volume 7.
2-6 previously released on Excursions In Ambience: The Third
Dimension.
1, 5, 7, 8 & 9 previously unreleased.
Remastered at Loud.
Ripper's note: This record is, to my mind, pure DPS. Many thanks
to A for springing for the reissue. Stone classic. Now on to the
Pitchfork gushing!
Being an early 1990s shoegaze band whose big claim to fame is that
they "went electronic," it's impossible to talk about Seefeel
without also talking about technology. On Seefeel's MySpace page,
there's live footage of "Industrious"-- from their 1993 album
Quique-- at a Russian festival in '94. The band doesn't quite
stand still; bassist Darren Seymour does some kind of spastic
dance during the bridge. But something about the basic immobility
of the band-- attempting to recreate its pulsing, programmed loops
live on stage, a music that pours My Bloody Valentine's oozing
pink and purple plasma onto techno's chrome skeleton-- is tied to
a long-gone age of implacable MIDI-sequencing, lacking the
real-time software flux available to Christian Fennesz or the
freedom of movement enjoyed by modern cyborg bands like Battles.
But only a maniac would claim that Kraftwerk's neon lights shine
any less brightly because they didn't have Ableton Live, and
Seefeel's music continues to sparkle 14 years later, an entire
generation having built an ambient-motorik noise-pop aesthetic
around Quique songs like "Plainsong". Too Pure finally brings the
album back into print after far too long with this double-disc
"Redux Edition", and listening now, you'll hear the beginnings of
a still-thriving genre that remains slippery and unnamed, purely
electronic music with a strange, tangy rock aftertaste-- think Tim
Hecker's own post-shoegaze explorations into ultra-violet noise,
Nathan Fake's plastic techno My Bloody Valentine homages, M83's
heavily sequenced Vangeliscapes, a good chunk of the Darla Records
catalog, and the twinkling textures of Mouse on Mars, who sent Too
Pure a mash note with their demo after they had become infatuated
with Quique. Even starting out in a genre where texture and noise
already did much of the heavy lifting, the "rock band" version of
Seefeel was just a shadow on the studio wall by the time of
Quique, making it kind of proto-IDM before the genre even really
had a name.
And in this rock-free space, the eight minutes of opener "Climatic
Phase No. 3" actually sound like "Comedown Phase No. 3". It's just
the barest tinkling of percussion, a rising and falling bass line
to provide a barely audible pulse guiding the track, and the
laziest melody Kevin Shields or Robin Guthrie never wrote. Not
afraid to name a song "Spangle", that most overused of adjectives
when it comes to post-Cocteau Twins' guitar atmospherics,
Seefeel's canvas on Quique was the azure 8-bit horizon of a
computer game where the band blew pixilated clouds that spritzed
digital mist and crafted minimal hooks from just hypnotic smears
of faraway feedback and Sarah Peacock's nape-of-your-neck intimate
whispers.
Needless to say, if Seefeel's pace gets to, say, mid-tempo, the
band's pretty damn worked up. The songs stretch out like groggy
limbs after a mid-day nap, and the band is often at its best when
it's at its most languid, as on the impossibly sensual and nearly
static "Filter Dub". The underrated, understated rhythm
work--rarely brought up when critics like me start talking
alliterative nonsense about vapor trails and guitar
swooshes--scrapes and pulses more than it pounds or strides, often
recalling a stiff Kraftwerkian metal-on-metal version of
polyrhythmic sway of Polynesian percussion. The silvery splash of
the cymbals on "Industrious" is just another harmonic color in the
palette; the chittering "Through You" sounds like gamelan recast
with Atari-era tools.
In the band's attempt escape rock's orbit, the second disc of nine
unreleased tracks and rare cuts melts any remaining physicality
away until all that's left is, as the band titles the last track,
a "Silent Pool", even removing most of the "techno" from "ambient
techno." The "avant garde" mix of "Charlotte's Mouth" mutes the
original's percussion until it's the spectral, washed-out blur of
an underdeveloped Polaroid, and the eerie "My Super 20" blows
barren winds as cold the bleakest tracks on AFX's Selected Ambient
Works II or the arctic static of Thomas Koner. Moving to labels
like Warp and Rephlex and exploring a more purely electronic
sound--guitarist Mark Clifford went on to a long and fruitful
techno career as Disjecta and other pseudonyms--was perhaps
Seefeel's only option as they forced a rock/techno fusion that the
technology of the time couldn't quite accommodate. But while it
would have undoubtedly been interesting to see where the band
might have gone in the anything-goes laptop age, Quique still
sounds timeless.
-Jess Harvell, May 04, 2007
p l a y l i s t
cd1 ..
..
01 Climatic Phase #3 08:25
02 Polyfusion 06:24
03 Industrious 06:40
04 Imperial 06:40
05 Plainsong 07:44
06 Charlotte's Mouth 07:28
07 Through You 05:48
08 Filter Dub 08:46
09 Signals 05:47
..
cd2 ..
..
01 Clique 05:29
02 Is It Now 04:23
03 Filter Dub (i-01 Mix) 09:41
04 Come Alive (Climactic Phase #1) 05:42
05 Time To Find Me (Alternate Desk Mix) 05:21
06 Charlotte's Mouth (Avant Garde Mix) 07:28
07 My Super 20 06:31
08 Climactic Phase #3 (Overnight Mix) 08:32
09 Silent Pool 07:02
123:51 min
g r e e t i n g s
agw - amok - bass - bcc - bex - boss - cmg - cmc - cms - d2h
def - dh - disc0 - drum - emp - ftd - fwyh - gem - i8 - ipc
jce - jfk - jrp - just - khz - kinky - kw - lame - maem - mbs
mgc - psycz - r2r - rac - radial - rapid - rks - rtb - sb
sever - sfe - soup - sour - sq - tr - trt - ube - uc - upe
uki - xtc - yard - zi
respect to music lovers worldwide
never forget : go to the show. buy the t-shirt. order the vinyl