“More Like Space” takes shape out of hovering ambiences, a shivering, undulating texture dotted with trebly clicks. It has its own beauty like that, but the cut comes to life when a bass nudges up from the bottom, carving a hypnotic path through the uncanny valley. Later, high, descanting vocals eddy through serene but ever moving calm. This is the title cut from Seefeel’s 1993 debut EP, and it threads the needle between ambient electronics, dub and shoegaze with the deepest kind of groove.
Seefeel floated at the periphery of early-1990s cross currents, coming in the wake of My Bloody Valentine’s ethereal thunder, but also in touch with cerebral electronicists like Aphex Twin and Autechre. In an interview with Perfect Sound Forever from 2003, the outfit’s main song- writer and sculptor Mark Clifford summed up the influences like this: “ Sarah [Peacock, vocals and guitar] … liked stuff like My Bloody Valentine, and Spacemen 3 as well. And Spirtualized…Daren [Seymour, bass] was more into krautrock like Kraftwerk and that kinda stuff, like Neu! and Faust. And Justin [Fletcher, percussion and rhythm programming] was …really into a lot of stuff that was also kind of like blues. Much more traditional music.”
All those threads got woven into one of the 1990s’ most unearthly and unclassifiable sounds, where dream pop reveries floated atop faint trip-hop pulses, synth washes bloomed and a bass thudded in cavernous architectures of sound. This reissue collects three of Seefeel’s earliest Eps, incorporating More Like Space, Plainsong, Time to Find Me, some Aphex Twin mixes and a previously unreleased demo of “Moodswing.”
Even within this short time span, the textures of Seefeel’s music shifted, from the curiously disembodied voluptuousness of the More Like Space tracks to the cerebral glitchiness of the Aphex Twin-remixed Time to Find Me. “Plainsong,” from the final of three Eps released in 1993, wheels and flutters like an offcut from Isn’t Anything, while “Moodswing” slinks and sidles like quiet storm soul re-imagined in deep space. That song, by the way, is offered again as a demo, much drier and less sensual in the early version, a click drum pacing Peacock’s elegiac vocals.
This was the opening salvo for Seefeel, coming just before the landmark Quique (which included a version of “Plainsong”). 1993 was an extraordinarily productive year for the band, generating three Eps and a full-length and defining its slippery pulsing daydream sound. That same core line-up went on for another four years before going on hiatus, though Clifford has released two additional full lengths as Seefeel with a different ensemble.
Pure, Impure doesn’t add a lot to the sum total we know about Seefeel. Most of the material has been reissued before, and as noted, there is only one unreleased track. As music, though, it’s a stunning invocation of a sound that related to other, more popular forms but floated gently free of them. If only for that bass line in “More Like Space,” it’s worth hearing.
