polyfusion

Upon reading a recent essay on PFM entitled The Lost Generation, I was left with a very strange feeling. What the author described was almost identical to what I experienced in my formative college years of music geekdom, my 2nd wave if you will. This nearly 5000 word document scanned my CD racks and followed me through the shoegazers and into Too Pure and into american post-rock (thanks, Simon Reynolds) and beyond. I knew every single release he talked about, every single person, all of it. I am not bragging, I am scared. Does this make me typecast? An intriguing read nonetheless on a typically eye-rolling website. Check it out.

One of the many bands mentioned in his treatise was Seefeel. And here listening to their debut LP, Quique, some 12 years later it still sounds fresher than ever to my ears. The essay calls Seefeel the midpoint between the ambient works of Eno and the modern laptop-gazer of artists like Ulrich Schnauss and thats not a bad concept really. AMG describes the album as such: They squint by staring into the geometric refractions of light and record the results. This is an even better descriptor. Its Neo-Minimalist Post-Shoegazer Future-Dub? (hah!) Maybe its one of the many lost MBV records that got scrapped over the years- during Kevin Shields' early Warp obsession. In hindsight it is pretty damn doped out futuristic loop-based minimalism (Reich, Riley, Glass), much akin to another artist mentioned in the essay, Insides (esp their Clear Skin EP, a 38 minute instrumental mindbender!). Put on your headphones and peel the thin layers of your brain back to fully embrace the pulsar at the very center of it all. Music for laying on your back with your eyes closed and slowly gliding around another solar system..

After Seefeel released a few albums and EPs, the members went onto other projects. Mainman Mark Clifford went onto solo project Disjecta and collab Sneakster. Others went on to Scala and more. Clifford also now has his own mini-label at Polyfusia Records. Apologies for my absence, a big loss of data on my work machine has kept my brain more than occupied unfortunately.

Seefeel - Polyfusion
Seefeel - Plainsong