2 posts tagged “london”

Not sparse enough to be ambient, too many live instruments for techno, too loopy for post rock, not loud enough to be shoegazer/dreampop...where exactly does Seefeel fit?

"Through You," from their first full-length, Quique, rides all of these genre lines pretty closely. There's plenty of guitar here, though it's all blurred and smeared and pushed way back in the mix, and it's pretty definitively non-rock guitar. There's a percussive element that could either be a heavily processed drum machine or drummer in a distant room. It builds slowly and steadily, but doesn't end much louder or more forceful than it began.

It's easy to see the lines of influence in retrospect, but sort of hard to see how they all wound up together. From the minimalism and pattern layering of 20th Century composers like Steve Reich and Terry Riley, to the insistent post-techno ryhthms of early Aphex Twin and, to the rich textures of everyone from Brian Eno to Kevin Shields, Seefeel was sort of a summation of a certain line of progress in the hitory of recorded music, where the focus was on feel, atmosphere, and tone rather than harmony, melody and rhythm. You can hear their own influence echoing today, rippling outward from the experimental territory they occupied, into deeper abstraction, and into more meditative rock/pop areas.

Let's hear it for educational synthpop!

This song is just complete giddy fun, packing in funky basslines, beat freakouts, found sounds and female vocals by Becky Jacobs, the sister of Max Tundra (AKA Ben Jacobs). It sort of sounds like a glitchier version of Prince remaking one of They Might Be Giants remakes of a song from an old educational record. It's typical of Jacobs' second album, Mastered by Guy At The Exchange, which is in itself atypical in almost every way. Carefree, playful, quirky, smart, and above all fun. Oh, and the album is named for its mastering engineer, a role that doesn't usually get much time in the spotlight. I can't think of another example of such a prominent shout-out off the top of my head...

MBGATE was originally released in the United States by Tigerbeat6, the notoriously weird and inscrutable label run by Miguel Depedro (AKA Kid606). Though Tundra's musical stylings are far less harsh than much of the Tigerbeat6 output, his spastic genre-hopping and restless pursuit of oddball ideas fit right in with labelmates like Cex, Numbers, and Blectum from Blechdom.