Nothing is ever finished in a Seefeel song. There is no final result—just a snapshot of an experiment in progress, a process in motion. Some sound like they’ve been going for a very long time—the pace glacial, galactic. We might hear a sourceless scrap of guitar, an errant drum, a lonely wisp of Sarah Peacock’s voice. A dread bass pulse the center of gravity. All these bits of shrapnel hang in tentative constellations; they drift. The forces at work are hidden from the ear: the methods arcane, the process inscrutable. The form of a given song is like a snapshot of the expanding cosmos at an arbitrary point in its evolution, a thumbnail image of infinity.
Over the years, the UK group—currently the duo of Peacock and producer/multi-instrumentalist Mark Clifford—has offered clues as to the nature, if not the causes, of its cosmological dub. The 1995 song “Utreat,” the loneliest and most minimalist thing Seefeel had yet created, stretched like a bridge from the final side of Succour to the opening of the following year’s (Ch-vox), where it appeared in even more stripped-down form as “Utreat (Complete).” Three years ago, the box set Rupt and Flex (1994-96) unpacked the overlapping sessions for both albums, gathering multiple versions that knocked familiar forms out of their known orbits. A drum part might lurch to the fore, or be swallowed into the distance; a smudge of old feedback might draw novel shapes against the black. In a few cases, the band seemed simply to be toying with the playback speed—slow, slower, slowest—and coaxing new frequencies out of the tape with every pass.
Squared Roots offers the clearest picture yet—well, except that the pictures are blurred almost beyond recognition—of the group’s dubwise, recombinant philosophy. All seven tracks spring from the same materials that yielded this past August’s Everything Squared, which was Seefeel’s first new album in 13 years. There were six tracks there, and though the new record is about half a minute shorter, there are seven here—a minor detail that I think says something about the way Seefeel’s sounds mutate and proliferate, like bacteria in a Petri dish.
Like Everything Squared, Squared Roots is about 50 percent thump, 50 percent shimmer. Dully thudding kick drums and answering swells of bass provide the frame; everything else is some abstract derivative of guitar and wordless voice, both of them stretched and smeared and dubbed beyond recognition. The guitars sound less like guitars than freight-train whistles, cool breezes, a winter sunrise; Peacock’s voice sounds less like singing than a celestial sigh. It’s impossible to describe with any kind of certainty the relationship between the earlier tracks and these new ones: Are these rough drafts or later versions? Alternate takes or actual glimpses of alternate dimensions?
If you had to summarize the difference between the two, you might decide that Squared Roots sounds more gaseous and diffuse than its predecessor—the sounds murkier, the shapes less defined, the drums so thickened by reverb that they seem to emanate from some cavern deep underground. “Touchless Tones,” true to its title, avoids anything as obvious as a struck drum or a strummed chord or a tongue against teeth; all of its sounds seem to have been eked directly from the air, like the pastel blush of an Aeolian harp.
Without knowing Squared Roots’ backstory, you might never realize that these are versions of Everything Squared songs, or at least share that album’s materials. After dozens of listens, I can identify a few commonalities. “So You Shall Be” takes the wraithlike melody of the earlier album’s “Antiskeptic” and strips away most of the rest—the snow-crunch drums, the dub lurch, the brief burst of overdrive. It feels like the former song has been turned inside out. “Multifolds” was Everything Squared’s catchiest track, with a shimmery shoegaze churn that flashes back to their 1993 album Quique; here, they borrow its most ethereal grace notes and pair them with slow-motion lightning bolts to create “Nerve Chasms,” a hollowed-out nether zone.
“Tail Trails,” the brightest and most propulsive track on the new record, is essentially a sped-up remake of Everything Squared’s “End of Here”—or perhaps, given its plodding pace and mushy fidelity, the earlier song is really a slowed-down version of “Tail Trails.” Which came first? Which is the “original” and which is the variation? The songs’ paths are so tangled, one wonders if even Clifford himself knows at this point. Squared Roots feels less like a supplement to Everything Squared—certainly nothing like a “remix album”—than a distorted mirror image, the yang to the other’s yin.
