Squared Roots

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?