SWEET EXORCIST
RetroActivity
WARP218
Warp Records 2011
23 Tracks. 151mins24secs

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‘If everything is ready from the dark side of the moon, play the five tones’. This sample from Close Encounter Of The Third Kind is a very familiar attribute to any self-respecting early British techno fan for being one of the defining features of Sweet Exorcist’s debut EP, Testone, Warp’s third EP, released in January 1990.

Two years ago, Warp celebrated its twentieth anniversary in fanfare with a rather splendid box set, a set of compilations and a string of events across the world. Although Sweet Exorcist were noticeably absent of these celebratory publications, Warp have put a double album together to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the release of Clonks Coming, the label’s very first album, originally published in early 1991. RetroActivity collects the original two EPs, Testone and Clonk, and the accompanying remix EPs which followed, the complete album and a handful of previously unreleased mixes and versions, making this a precious document of the bleepy Northern techno which defined much of the early electronica movement of the next two decade on one side, and much of Warp’s catalogue throughout the nineties.

Named after a Curtis Mayfield track, Sweet Exorcist was the project of Richard H. Kirk, who had been a prominent figure on the underground electronic scene for well over a decade as part of Cabaret Voltaire, and through his solo projects, and Richard ‘DJ Parrot’ Barratt, one of the main DJs at Sheffield’s Jive Turkey. Released shortly after Forgemasters’ Track With No Name and Nightmares On Wax’s Dextrous, Testone was an oddity even back then. The tracks were the result of experiments with studio test tones placed over minimal beats which until then had been the preserve of Detroit DJs. This minimal approach defined the Sweet Exorcist releases that followed. The Testone and Testone Remixes EPs were essentially variations on a theme, with Testthree and Testsix denoting a marginally moodier approach. This approach was also key to the Clonk and Per Clonk EPs, although the latter appear infuse with some of the afro ethic which has been part of Kirk’s work through his Sandoz or Al Jabr projects since.

Clonks Coming partially built up on this dynamic, especially with Mad Jack which opened the proceedings, but once again the music was subjected to an intense process of repetition as the pair re-used motifs and patterns through the whole album, in exactly the same way they had done with the previous EPs. Barratt and Kirk were taking minimalism to its extreme by breaking up their extensively modular compositions and placing their components in all sorts of combinations. The result may have appeared slightly lacking of scope at first, but Clonks Coming proved an incredibly varied and intriguing album, and still does so today.

Amongst the unreleased material featured here, exhumed from Kirk’s archives, are early versions of Testone and Clonks Coming, both considerably more stripped down than the released versions, with the former, build around a bass motif and a drum pattern, barely recognisable. An alternate version of Mad Jack is by contrast surprisingly meatier than anything else the pair released at the time as the organ riff which can be heard toward the end of the album mix is given much more prominence as the bleeps are pushed toward the back.

Sweet Exorcist went on to release a further album on Touch three year later, but these early Warp experiments remain seminal pieces of early electronica. These, alongside tracks by Forgemasters, Nightmares On Wax, Tricky Disco or LFO truly defined Warp’s early sound and were undeniably key to the label’s early success, but they also paved the way for the Artificial Intelligence series and the wave of artists that came with it. As a document of that period, RetroActivity is invaluable. The fact that these tracks feel as fresh and to the point now as they did twenty years ago is a testament of the durability of such music.

5/5

Richard H. Kirk talks to themilkfactory and looks back at the whole Sweet Exorcist story, from how the pair got acquainted to working with Warp and becoming part of the label’s legend.

 Richard H. Kirk | Warp Records
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Richard H. Kirk was already a legendary figure on the electronic scene when he teamed up with DJ  Parrot, then one of the main DJs at Sheffield’s club Jive Turkey, to form Sweet Exorcist, and recorded a series of minimalist techno records which were released on a fledgling label called Warp. The following album, Clonks Coming, was to be the first album released by the label. Twenty years on, to celebrate this momentous event, Warp have collected the album and EPs into a double album. Here, we catch up with Richard H. Kirk and look back at the whole Sweet Exorcist story, from how the pair got acquainted to working with Warp and becoming part of the label’s legend.

It’s been twenty years since you and Richard ‘DJ Parrot’ Barratt released music as Sweet Exorcist. The album, Clonks Coming, was the first album released on Warp, and to celebrate this, Warp have just released a double CD compilation which features the original album and EPs plus a handful of previously unreleased tracks. What do you remember of that time and of your aspirations as a musician back then?
Lots of warehouse parties, really multi racial scene, the Jive Turkey club at Occasions in Sheffield where Winston Hazel and Parrot were the main DJs. Spending 200 quid a month on 12” singles from the Warp shop, even though I didn’t DJ back then. There was definitely a musical revolution happening and it was great to be a small part of it. I don’t go clubbing these days but I don’t think there were better times to be had since that period. It was before the superclub/superstar DJ thing took over.

How do you think the album and EPs accompanying it have stood the test of time?
I think they’ve stood the test very well.

When you recorded Clonks Coming, you were already an established artist, with a very successful career as a member of Cabaret Voltaire, and you were suddenly going in a very different direction. Was it something you’d had in mind for some time?
Well, it wasn’t that different. CV was electronic dance music, if you listen to some of the mixes of CV’s Easy Life from that period, it aint lightyears away. But it was a breath of fresh air to work with younger people like Parrot and Rob Gordon (Forgemasters), who I did the Xon EP with. I had been working on some proto house/techno tracks aside from CV, so I think it was more than likely that I’d end up working with some of the emergent new talent in Sheffield.

How did you and Richard Barratt meet, and how did the idea of Sweet Exorcist come up?
I had met Richard in Sheffield at the Limit Club. We seemed to get on OK and liked a lot of the same music, so it was inevitable that we’d talk about doing some music together. This would have been about 84/85. Then I had asked him to DJ on a Cabaret Voltaire British tour in 1986, and later CV were invited to play live on the Old Grey Whistle Test, so I suggested we play live at an early incarnation of Jive Turkey, at occasions were Parrot was deejaying alongside Winston Hazel.  Some time after, I invited Parrot to come into the studio (Western Works) to help out with some proto house tracks I’d been working on. He brought along Carl Munson (DJ Ping Pong). After that they went on to form Funky Worm, so we kind of stopped. After Funky Worm had finished, Parrot came to me with this idea about making a club track with studio test tones, which were used to align multi track tape machines. We ended up using a test oscillator from the mixing desk instead, and really that’s how it started. Really, the track was conceived for dropping at Jive Turkey and Warp got involved, saying they’d like to release it. So then we needed a name and Parrot suggested Sweet Exorcist (taken from the name of a Curtis Mayfield track). I thought that was cool as I was a fan of Curtis from way back.

Clonks Coming was the very first album released on Warp, which was, at the time, a very new venture, with only a few releases in its catalogue, all of which were EPs? Was it important that it was a Sheffield-based label?
I think it was a question of being in the right place at the right time. I had vaguely known Steve Beckett from when he was running the Fon/Warp records shop and then they had the first release with Forgemasters’ Track With No Name, which I think did really well, followed on by Nightmares On Wax’s Dextrous. So Testone was lined up as the next release but it took quite a time in the studio to get it right. But yeah, it was great that we had a label in Sheffield. It made it kind of special.

The music on the EPs and album released back in 1991 was very minimal. The influence of the Detroit scene of the time was quite clear, but who or what in particular inspired you at the time?
Well there was so much, mainly by black American artists. New stuff I was enjoying around that time would be things like Equation’s The Answer, The Burrell Brothers’ Vandal EPs, the Nu Groove and Strictly Rhythm labels, Marshall Jefferson’s The Truth, Tribal House’s Motherland, Dub Poets’ Black & White EP, 808 State, A Guy Called Gerald, Unique 3’s The Theme, Mr Fingers, Suburban Knights’ The Art Of Stalking, Blake Baxter, Derrick May, Juan Atkins/Model 500… I mean it was chigago//Detroit/New York, but then a lot of British, especially northern folks, started making their own take on things, which I guess is where Sweet Exorcist fits in.

The sound was very much in line with much of the releases on Warp then, as the presence of Testfour on the Pioneers Of The Hypnotic Groove compilation, alongside Forgemasters, LFO, DJ Mink, Nightmates On Wax or Tricky Disco, attests. Did you have the feeling of being part of something completely new in the UK at the time?
I reckon so, alongside some of the UK artists I mentioned before.

Although Clonks Coming was officially the first album released on Warp, it was originally I believed scheduled as an EP, with the vinyl version bearing the letters CCEP and catalogue number WAP13, as opposed the to the CD version, which had CCCD on its cover. Why was that?
I think we just had so much material we wanted to use, it kind of outgrew the EP idea. Although it was tricky fitting fifty-two minutes onto a vinyl 12”. Ideally it would have been a double, but I guess everyone was conscious of budget, I think everyone just thought of it as an album. It was certainly the first long player Warp had done and I think it was probably the first thing not specifically aimed at the dance floor. We went off on a more experimental mission.

As I mentioned earlier, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the release of Clonks Coming, Warp have released RetroActivity, which compiles the album, EPs and some unreleased material. What has your involvement been in this project?
The license period for Sweet Exorcist expired last year so we resigned. I suggested to Warp the idea of collecting the 12” singles and the album onto two CDs. Then Steve at Warp asked if there were any other mixes in the vault, so I spent about three weeks going through the archive and transferring from a lot of different formats and sent the unreleased material on to Warp. They then compiled the album which became RetroActivity.

Three years after Clonks Coming, you released a second album as Sweet Exorcist, this time on Touch. Why did you choose Touch instead of Warp then?
I think that by that time we’d moved on and so had Warp. I think the material was maybe better suited to a more esoteric label like Touch. I would have been happy for Warp to do it but I’m not sure they were that into the material.

You released two albums under your name on Warp in 94-95, and were also featured on the second installment of the Artificial Intelligence series of compilations, but haven’t worked with the label since. Is there a particular reason for this or would you consider working with them again in the future?
By the mid nineties I was getting restless with the whole ambient/’intelligent techno’ scene and wanted to make some harder dance music, which Warp weren’t really doing at that time, so I started releasing more on my own label (Intone). Also, I suspect they had gotten a bit fed up with me releasing so many other albums as well as the ones I was doing for them, but I had a creative surge and just wanted to release as much as possible. But of course I would work with them again. They know where to find me!

You’ve released music under quite a lot of aliases since. Do you think your work with Sweet Exorcist has impacted at all on the music you’ve released since, and if yes, how?
No, I think that was just another project I was involved in, but a pretty damn good one. It was a good experience but I moved on to other things after that.

A few years ago, you released an EP on Sheffield-based imprint Dust Science. Do you think you’ll be working with them again?
Maybe, we’re still in touch and I’ve deejayed with The Black Dog a couple of times and just done a remix for them.

In the mid nineties, you set up your own record label, Intone, which has been an outlet to release your own music, but the label seems to have been dormant for a little while. Do you have any plans to release more music through the label?
Yes, but I don’t have distribution for physical releases at the moment. I’ve been releasing most of my new work (and archive) through AWAL/iTunes, but I’m really keen to do some vinyl and CD releases sooner rather than later.

Most of the releases have been digital. Do you see the CD as a dying format now?
Sadly it looks that way, although I might add I’ve never downloaded any music, legally or otherwise. I’m still buying all my music on CD and there are still a lot of other people doing the same.

As part of Cabaret Voltaire, you were one of the pioneering members of Sheffield’s electronic music scene. Did you have any incline that your work would become so influential in the nineties and beyond? How do you feel about it?
No inclination about that, but it’s great that people are still talking about it/discovering it many years later.

Your release schedule has been pretty relentless for many years. Do you still find it the same making music now as when you started or doe s it mean something very different nowadays?
No, partly because so much time has passed since I started around 1973. Also, most of what I do now is computer driven, whereas before it was mainly played by hand on instruments, which is what I’ve started getting back to recently.

What’s next for you? Which one of your projects are you working on? Is there any new Richard H. Kirk record due out in the coming months you can talk about?
I have three different albums which I’m hoping to finish by the end of the year but I’m not saying what they are at the moment.

Email interview November 2011. Thank you to Richard H. Kirk and Leah Ellis.

Richard H. Kirk | Warp Records

RUSTIE
Glass Swords
WARP217
Warp Records 2011
13 Tracks. 42mins14secs

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Hailing from Glasgow where he’s slowly been imposing his sound alongside the likes of Hudson Mohawke and the Numbers collective, Rustie landed on Warp last year on the back of a fistful of EPs released since 2007. His first EP for the label, Sunburst, was published just over a year ago and received wide critical acclaim, instantly placing Russell Whyte, as he was christened, alongside the like of Warp non-conformists à la Aphex or Clark.

Glitzy, playful and in yer face, Glass Swords is a thrilling machine indeed. Caught up between bleepy video game soundtrack, futuristic R&B, bombastic eighties electro-pop and E’d-up rave, Rustie heads this roller-coaster of an album with the brazen presumption of a maverick on a rampage. After the shimmering synthetic rush of the opening title track, Rustie sets the pace from Flash Back and never once softens his grip even an iota for the remaining forty-or-so minutes. Channelling huge levels of energy though cheesy synthesizer washes, stripped down beats and quirky electronic motifs, Whyte wraps up his ideas in tight little vignettes as fast as he dispenses them, most of them clocking somewhere around the three-minute mark. Occasionally, vocals, the contribution of Nightwave, find a space amongst the deluge of fizzy synths, more often than not in processed form, most prominently on the oddly soulful Surph, sounding like Prince played at the wrong speed, and the effervescent Globes.

Such downpour of beats and incendiary synthetic sounds could prove somewhat draining very rapidly, yet in Rustie’s hands, they are merely joyous manifestations infused with a huge sense of fun. As he juggles between funky grooves (Flash Back, Hover Traps), dazed electro (City Star, Ultra Thizz), infectious uplifting rave (After Light) and dreamy techno-pop (Globes, Crystal Echo), Rustie hits the spot time and time again as he creates some of the most exhilarating electronic music heard in a long while.

For someone who looks barely old enough to drive, Rustie collates some of the exciting trends in electro of the last thirty years in one handy package and delivers it with the confidence and aplomb of someone who’s been doing it for years. Glass Swords is an album which grabs you by the balls, drags you on the dance floor and leaves you utterly exhausted and euphoric at the end of the night. You can’t ask for more.

4.7/5

Rustie (MySpace) | Warp Records
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AFRICA HITECH
93 Million Miles
WARPCD199
Warp Records 2011
11 Tracks. 58mins19secs

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Africa Hitech dropped a substantial first EP of broken dubstep and hip-hop-infused grooves just over a year ago, setting the hype machine in full swing in the process. The project of Mark Pritchard (of Global Communication/Jedi Knights/Harmonic 313 fame) and Steve ‘Spacek’ White, the idea of Africa Hitech came out of a desire to blend Detroit techno, soul and Jamaican dancehall. This was first synthesized into the razor-sharp urban textures of Blen, which was followed a few weeks later by an even more hard-hitting second offering, Hitecherous.

Fast-forward a year, and 93 Million Miles takes the pair’s original template and expands it to full length format. Right from the hyperactive opening title track, with its syncopated urban beat, minimal keyboard washes and vocoded electronic voice, the pair move beyond their first EPs to assert further the intrinsically digital context of their music, something which comes out even more clearly later on with the utterly excellent and hypnotic hard-edged digital dub of Out In The Street or the arcade bleep-happy Gangslap or Foot Step. This album is a vastly eclectic mix of concussed beats, playful eruption of electronics and lush linear soundscapes, which fuses its influences and scatter them out again in chaotic clusters faster than it is humanly possible to take stock. This is quite a dangerous thing to do, or at least it would be in the hands of less experienced musicians than these two. Here, it becomes a thrilling journey where pretty much anything can, or should, happen at any moment.

Pritchard and White never chose the easy route to progress through this album, but this is exactly what makes it such a thoroughly enjoyable listen. Following the hardened surfaces of Do U Wanna Fight, the massive sleek Out In The Streets feels like getting out of cold straight into a gigantic warehouse party and instantly be dripping with sweat. The transition between Gangslap, Our Luv and Spirit is equally as disjointed. One minute you’re being chased by some pixelated baddies in some SuperMario land, the next you’ve stepped onboard some trans-continental night train and are cutting through the countryside at the speed of light, before finding yourself sat around a fire in an African village in the deepest savanna, with Richard H Kirk as your host. And then there’s the tribal jazz of Cyclic Sun, the noxious atmosphere of Future Moves or the pastoral dubstep of Light The Way to throw things out even more.

Whatever tags stick to this record, and more generally to what they have produced so far, doesn’t affect Africa Hitech in the least. 93 Million Miles is, despite its comprehensive eclecticism, an extremely consistent album fueled by an infectious mirth.

4.8/5

Africa Hitech | Africa Hitech (MySpace) | Warp Records
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Out In The Streets by Warp Records

AUTECHRE
EPS 1991-2002
WARPCD211
Warp Records 2011
47 Tracks. 339mins59secs

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For years, Autechre alternated albums and EPs with extreme regularity, the latter often acting as experimental playgrounds for Sean Booth and Rob Brown to try out new ideas. This release documents the first ten years of the band, from their very first, pre-Warp, outting to Gantz Graf. While Autechre have continued to release occasional EPs after that, they have been less prolific with that format in recent years, only two, Quaristice.Quadrange and Move Of Ten, having materialised, the former solely made available as a digital release, both counting too many tracks to be considered proper EPs.

Basscad EP (1994) consisted of entirely revised versions of Basscadet, a track originally featured on the band’s Incunabula album, released the year before, some created by the band themselves, others concocted by Seefeel or Beaumont Hannant, unfortunately omitted here. This remains the band’s only remix EP, the only other release coming close to a remix project being Quaristice.Quadrange, released in 2008, on which Autechre collected entirely different versions of tracks originally featured on Quaristice. Consequent EPs have all been standalone releases, for the most part album companions (Garbage, Anvil Vapre, Envane, which all used tracks said to have been recorded during the sessions for Amber, Tri Repetae and Chiastic Slide respectively).

Autechre first got noticed with two tracks featured on Warp’s seminal original Artificial Intelligence compilation, but it wasn’t quite their first foray into the music industry. One release pre-dates the long standing association between the pair and Warp. Initially released in 1991 as a very limited white label EP on the short lived Hardcore Records, Cavity Job and Accelera 1 & 2, available here for the first time on CD, stand apart in Autechre’s cannon. While these two tracks display some early signs of the band’s regular influences (hip-hop and breakbeat), there is nothing of the infinitely complex abstraction that has been at the core of every single of their releases since. Instead, these were typical hardcore rave anthems of that era, complete with vocal samples, combining breakbeat, techno and acid house in a similar way to early Black Dog. Autechre never returned to such overtly dance floor-orientated sound, but the hardcore element has regularly featured in their work, never as prominently as on Gantz Graf, and it is certainly no coincidence that these two EPs open and close this compendium. Gantz Graf was an altogether much more abstract and extreme affair however. At the time of its released, the CD was bundled up with a DVD which featured the cutting-edge visual feast that was Alex Rutterford’s video for the title track, which attracted a lot of attention for its hyperactive digital imagery, which appeared to react to the razor-sharp rhythm and equally digital cut-up aspect of the track. As a musical piece, this is probably as extreme as Autechre have ever been, their equivalent to Aphex Twin’s Come To Daddy perhaps.

In between these two poles, and beyond, Autechre have relentlessly continued to experiment with new sounds and remained totally outside of any movement and fashion, and have steered clear of any overbearing message in their work. One major exception to this however is Anti (1994), published as a protest against an anti-rave clause included in the UK Criminal Justice and Public Order Act introduced that same year which outlawed the performance of music containing a ‘succession of repetitive beats’ at crowd gatherings. While two of the three tracks on the EP (Lost and Djarum) were explicitly made from repetitive patterns, the third, Flutter, was programmed in such a way that, despite sounding repetitive, no two bars were exactly the same, hence making it a fully legal piece to play at raves. Denounced by some as a gimmick novelty release at the time, it has since won over its critics to become one of Autechre’s most emblematic releases.

Garbage, Anvil Vapre and Envane, released between 1995 and 1997, saw the band gaining in confidence and daring push boundaries much further to deliver some of their most compelling EPs, the later two especially partially reflecting the intense organic structures found on Tri Repetae and Chiastic Slide. While there was little space for melody amidst the corrosive distorted noises and concussed beat of Second Bad Vilbel, tracks such as Second Scepe, Second Scout or Laughing Quarter appeared surprisingly light, while Second Peng dubby patterns proved extremely dense amd Goz Quarter sounded like some futuristic jazz. Published between Chiastic Slide and LP5, Cichlisuite announced a definite change of direction as the pair were seen ditching heavily distorted and cut-up sounds and noises for the much cleaner, almost clinical textures which were further developed over the next couple of years.

Counting eleven tracks and spanning seventy minutes, EP7 (1998) defied usual EP conventions. Additionally, the initial UK CD release contained a hidden track which could only be accessed by pressing rewind from the beginning of Rpeg. Released almost a year after LP5, on the cusp of the band’s most experimental and abstract era, EP7 was a resolutely more atmospheric collection, although, it showed a level of complexity which would reach its peak between Confield and Untilted. Completing this release as the band’s two Peel Session EPs, released in 1999 and 2001 respectively. Both sessions were recorded in the band’s studio, the first in 1995, the second four years later. When Autechre delivered the second set of tracks, they were all untitled and consequently named Gelk, Blifil, Gaekwad and 19 Headaches by Peel while on air.

Autechre would never quite suit a traditional best of, but this collection certainly serves to highlight a part of Sean Booth’s and Rob Brown’s considerable body of work which has often been at the forefront of their sound. It also demonstrate, if needed, how consistent they have been, not only during their first ten years, but all along their career.

5/5

Autechre | Warp Records
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At the beginning of the nineties, Seefeel, originally formed of Mark Clifford, Sarah Peacock, Justin Fletcher and Mark Van Hoen, who was later replaced with Darren Seymour, found themselves treading the boundary between shoegaze, then in its dying days, and the rising electronica movement, releasing three seminal albums and a handful of EPs between 1993 and 1996. Then, although the four never officially split up, Seefeel was put on an indefinite hold. Now back, with two new members, a new album and a forthcoming tour, we took the opportunity to speak with Mark Clifford and Sarah Peacock about the very idea of Seefeel, their renewed focus and what may be the beginning of a new era for the band.

When you started Seefeel, did you already have the idea of mixing acoustic instrumentation and electronics?
Mark Clifford: It was never a conscious decision. It was based on my influences and on necessity. I grew up listening to Cocteau Twins, Joy Division, New Order and the like who all had elements of electronic rhythm in their music, so it was always something that I found interesting – the tension between the human and the machine. So when I started making music, it seemed the logical way to record beats, not having access to the necessary resources to properly record a drum kit. So naturally, these ideas filtered into Seefeel. Likewise with guitars – I was never a very technically good guitarist (and to be honest had no real desire or drive to be) so effects were a way to compensate.

This is something that has since been influencing quite a lot of artists. Did you have any idea that your sound would be assimilated in such way, and how do you feel about it?
MC: It’s not something I ever thought about and it’s not something I really think about now since I really don’t know who has or has not been influenced by us. It’s flattering if people have, but I am also aware that these developments in music were happening before us and would have happened without us.

Who has influenced your work as Seefeel?
MC: Well Cocteau Twins were really the first music that I heard that triggered something in my head to the effect that I wanted to make music. before then I had really just listened to music but never saw myself making it. Subsequently so much has influenced me because I feel that all music I hear has some bearing in the way I make music, in either a negative or positive way. By that, I mean that the sounds I hear are either something I like and stick in my subconscious or that I don’t like and I’m pushed away from those places

When Too Pure re-released Quique a few years ago, did you have any input in the Redux version?
MC: Yes, they left it to me to collate the tracks and oversee the orders etc. as I had the unreleased masters. It was quite strange digging through so many old tapes and so forth. Like revisiting a place that meant something special to you once.

Sarah Peacock: I helped with the artwork (digging out the originals from a dusty pile in the spare room!), and Justin provided the flyers etc. for the sleeve collage.

I was at the ICA gig you played last year, which was your first UK performance in some years. What made you decide to get back performing live once again a couple of years ago after such a long time, and why did you stop after Succour?
MC: It was really because after the re-issue Sarah and I had decided to exchange some ideas and coincidently it was Warp’s 20th and they asked if we would play one of the shows. It was really just beautiful timing. It felt comfortable for the first time in a long time so we ran with it. After Succour touring had become a real grind for us and really quite frustrating and dispiriting because we felt the optimism of the previous four or five years had been crushed brutally by the onset of Brit Pop.

SP: We decided to take six months off in 1995 and…

Have your respective projects outside of Seefeel fed into your sound with the band now do you think, and if yes, in what way?
MC: Everything I have done, both released and unreleased, has had a bearing in some way. Making music for me is a continuous process. I don’t see stop or start points. It’s a constant journey for want of a cleverer word.

SP: Not directly, as the music I’ve been involved with making has been quite different from Seefeel. I think the main things that have changed for me is that I’ve matured and grown in confidence, and am a lot less precious about my contribution.

Steve Beckett from Warp apparently asked you to record a new album following your performance at the Warp20 party in Paris a couple of years ago. Did it really happen, and was it something you’d talked amongst yourselves before?
MC: Yes, Steve was so pleased with our performance he was beaming ear to ear. It was amazing for us. He asked us to get in touch once we were back in England I think which we did. I think we would have started new recordings anyway but I don’t think it would have been such an easy or confident ride for us without Warp’s backing.

Mark, in the press release for your new album, you’re quoted saying that the arrival of Shigery Ishihara and Ilda ‘E-Da’ Kazuhisa had changed the dynamic of the band. In what way would you say this has happened?
MC: In the early days of Seefeel I felt very much burdened with the responsibility of overseeing every element, every instrument, of the recording process with the exception of the vocals. It was very stressful for me. E-Da and Shige help alleviate some of that pressure. Shige especially is someone I can trust because he understands me very well and he understands the music. So I can give him a demo and he will inevitably come up with a bass line that I not only like but which can also further inspire me. This is more and more the case and in the new material we have written since we finished recording Seefeel there is an easiness that started to come at the end of the album sessions as we started to find our feet as a band.

SP: We’ve discovered a new capacity for improvisation – in playing, and effects manipulation (especially useful for filling the gaps between tracks in the live set!).

On the new album, the guitars sound much sharper than on previous records, with distortions being used quite extensively, and the drums also appear very prominent. Was that a conscious effort?
MC: I think it was only conscious in that I did not want to use any of my own sounds from previous work I had done. I tried to expand what I do with the guitar. It’s been a good exercise for me. The rhythms are purposefully very dry because that was something I liked at the time and this makes them feel more stark I think.

Sarah, although your voice still has a lot of effects applied to it, it is, at least at times, especially on Faults, much clearer and at the front of the mix. Is it a way for you to reclaim your position as vocalist within the band?
SP: That’s not my doing really; Mark produced the album without me hovering over the fader! I think it’s because I had much better formed ideas for this new album, some of which Mark said actually inspired the direction of the tracks…  When we did Succour and (Ch-Vox) the vocals weren’t necessarily recognisable as they were so processed, but they sounded absolutely right in those contexts.

The album is also much less atmospheric than Succour or (Ch-Vox), returning in some ways to the more structured forms of your earlier records. Did you feel you had reached a point with these two albums which you couldn’t pursue?
MC: Not really no. Again I think it was just wanting to explore something different. We have not abandoned those territories. I think the next recordings you’ll find will draw in some of those more sonic aspects again.

After such a long time, there are quite a lot of expectations from fans I guess. As the new album is just about to be released, do you feel any pressure or excitement about how it will be received?
MC: Of course yes now that it is done and out there. During the recording process not so much, we just enjoyed making it. I’m sure some people will like it and some will be disappointed but I think whatever record we made that would be the case. It’s the nature of making music I think. All we can do is make music to the best of our ability and hope that people find something good in it.

You have worked with quite a few different labels over the years, from Too Pure to Warp and Rephlex. How do you choose the labels you work with, and is there a particular reason why you have kept on changing?
MC: Well the only real change was from Too Pure to Warp which really happened because I felt Warp were able to offer us more at that time. I felt slightly like the odd child on Too Pure whereas Warp seemed a more natural home for us. Maybe that’s not right so much in retrospect but I don’t regret it at all and Warp have been very supportive of us I think. The album for Rephlex was really just a thank you to Richard for having done such exquisite remixes of Time To Find Me. We didn’t ever ‘join’ that label.

Mark, you also set up your own label, Polyfusia, a few years ago. Is the label still active, and did you consider releasing this new album yourself?
MC: I think if no-one else had shown any interest and if we had something worthy of releasing I/we probably would have released it but not on Polyfusia as I really wrapped that up a while ago as it’s not something I was getting much pleasure from at the time. I do plan to start something afresh this year though.

You are playing a date at Kings Place next week, then you have a few dates in March and April which are going to take you the UK, Europe and Japan. What can people expect from Seefeel live?
MC: Well, there will be loud bits and quiet bits, new parts and old parts. Probably more improvisation within tracks because that’s something we are more able to do, so hopefully each gig will offer something unique.

You recently opened for Michael Rother, who was playing the music of Neu! at Barbican. How did you get involved in this event? Was Neu! an influence for you?
MC: Neu! were not really an influence no as I did not hear them until well after Seefeel had recorded well, certainly Quique. I wasn’t really up on that scene except of course for Kraftwerk. I had a Holger Czukay album or two but didn’t even know Can really. In fact when we signed to Warp, Steve actually bought me Tago Mago and Future Days because I don’t think he could quite believe my blank expression when he mentioned these records. Anyway, Michael had seen Seefeel play in Cologne in 1994 and wrote some really great things about us. I think he had heard that we had played a few weeks earlier at the ICA and we were asked to support.

It might be a bit early to talk about the future, but how do you see Seefeel evolve in the coming years, and do you think this new dynamic is going to lead to more records?
MC: I think we are oozing new material right now to the point that the new album already feels quite old to us. We started to come together as a band more and more during the recording of the album and I think we can achieve so much more.

Could you name 5 records, films or books that have been very influential in your life?
MC: That’s too difficult to do because whichever five I give there will be another five that could have been and another five beyond that etc., etc.
SP: Me too! Can we have 50 instead?

Email interview January 2011. Thank you to Mark Clifford, Sarah Peacock and Debbie Ball.

Seefeel (MySpace) | Warp Records

It’s been fifteen years since Seefeel last released a record, and even longer since they stopped performing live. The band returned to the stage at the end of 2008 for a unique live performance as part of the Warp20 celebrations in Paris. Prompted by an enthusiastic reception from Warp honcho Steve Beckett, Mark Clifford and Sarah Peacock, now with new members Shigeru Ishihara and Ilda Kazuhisa, got back in the studio and began working on new songs. The result first materialised with Faults last year, then with a self-titled album, both showing a band experimenting with much rawer and angular forms. Coinciding with the release of this fourth album, the band played a headlining performance at Kings Place, ahead of a series of live dates which will take them through the UK, Europe and beyond in the coming months.

While last year’s set at the ICA focused very much on old material, with only the pieces from Faults to hint at what they’d been up to, Seefeel exposed much more of their new record during this evening’s performance. Kicking off with the heavy distortions of Dead Guitars, the quartet firmly set the tone, with drums and bass placed to the fore, whilst Clifford’s dense soundscapes and guitar textures were left to develop towards the back, and Peacock’s voice, often drowned in layers of noise and always caught up in effects and loops, floated in the ether above. It was almost as if they appeared to play in different rooms so clear was the demarkation between the two halves of the band. Later. the slightly gentler Airless or the much more loaded Rip-Run were twisted further, and even the more minimal and stripped down Faults was erupting with distorted bass, pulsating heavily and adding sharp edges as the track progressed. The rhythmic alliance continued to delineate songs with ear-bleeding crunches while the guitars, which, in all logic, should have been slicing through to dictate the relief of the songs, were in the contrary building up into abstract atmospheric drapes, occasionally sharpened a tad by heavily processed feedback, Sarah Peacock’s predominantly wordless vocals often layered in similar soothing ambient harmonies.

Old favourites were equally torn apart by Kazuhisa’s dominant drums and smeared with thick layers of distortions and noise. The eerie hypnotic grooves of Succour-era Seefeel were given much dryer and abrasive settings. The sequenced electronic drums of Fracture were smothered in grit and feedback, and while both Clifford and Peacock framed the track in dense swathes of guitars, Ishihara was coming from behind to tear them apart. Equally, the sleek drum patterns of Gatha were extruded drastically and hit with repeat assaults of random clouds of noise, most of which was generated once again by Ishihara, while the ordinarily dreamy and smooth Filter Dub was molested rather drastically, its rounded chords given jagged edges by deep throbbing bass influx.

Seefeel closed with a hybrid piece which, from the onset, appeared firmly grounded in today’s Seefeel, but which, through delicately shimmering electronics and Peacock’s increasingly layered vocals, also harked back almost all the way back to Quique, bringing the band back to where it all started, while keeping an eye firmly set into the future.

Seefeel (MySpace) | Warp Records | Kings Place

SEEFEEL
Seefeel
WARP205
Warp Records 2011
09 Tracks. 51mins35secs

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Fourteen years on from their last album, and with two new members on board, the return of one of the most highly regarded bands of the early nineties is something of a major event. Seefeel never actually split up, but its members had, since the release of (Ch-Vox) on Rephlex back in 1996, focused on various projects and appeared to have drifted apart in such a way that it seemed totally unimaginable to see them working together again. It is the release of an expanded version of Seefeel’s seminal debut album, Quique, by Too Pure in 2007 which brought Mark Clifford and Sarah Peacock back talking. Since, the band, now counting Shigery Ishihara, better known as DJ Scotch Egg, and Ilda ‘E-Da’ Kazuhisa, have performed a handful of live dates, including one in Paris as part of the Warp20 celebrations, and returned in September last year with a brand new EP, Faults, now followed by this new album.

One of the prerequisites of the band ever recording again was always to create something different from anything they had done before. While Faults was still built from extremely processed guitar textures, hypnotic bass lines and occasional ethereal vocal strips, Seefeel appeared to be displaying a much drier and splintered sound. Seefeel have indeed moved on from the vast atmospheric stretches of Succour and (Ch-Vox) to accommodate guitars in all their distorted glory once again. Of course, these are meticulously dissected, bent out of shape and processed before being applied, but while, on previous records, they were often drowned in thick layers of effects and looped into smooth and acutely polished soundscapes, they are here highly granular, distorted and rugged, as the short opening piece, O-on One, demonstrates. This is however much more developed on the following piece, quite aptly titled Dead Guitars. There is no doubting the provenance of the sound sources here, but the extent and intensity of the decay is quite impressive.

With Faults, Seefeel approach the notion of sonic decomposition from a very different angle. Perhaps one of their most minimal pieces to date, Peacock’s voice, layered as to give it a disturbingly ghostly aspect, is left utterly exposed, the guitars only positioned in sparse clusters throughout. A similar process is applied to the vocal part on Airless, but Peacock’s performance is placed much deeper in the mix, resonating radically differently. With dubbed guitars, hypnotic bass loops and straightforward rhythmic patterns, Rip-Run and Making sound much more familiar in comparison, harking back to the linear forms of Quique, the latter feeling momentarily strangely reminiscent of Plainsong.

Seefeel return to grainier textures with the two closing pieces, Aug30 and Sway, once again converting distortion and feedback into rough angular components, but they are here tempered by much softer soundscapes in the background, taking the edge off their jagged contours to render these compositions much dreamier.

Seefeel have for years been hailed as one of the best and most interesting band around, a position they assume here with aplomb. With this album, they have totally overalled their sound without losing its essence. The music is as hypnotic and ethereal as it was in the nineties, yet, it relies on much grittier sound sources and appears dirtier and more abstract. Still, this album is unmistakably Seefeel.

5/5

Seefeel (MySpace) | Warp Records
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BRIAN ENO
Small Craft On A Milk Sea
WARPCD207
Warp Records 2010
15 Tracks. 48mins56secs

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Musician, producer, composer… there is little Brian Eno hasn’t tried his hand at. For his latest album, his first for Warp, he has teamed up once again with regular collaborators Jon Hopkins, with whom he had most notably previously worked with on his 2005 album And Then So Clear, and guitarist Leo Abrahams, who has appeared on a number of Eno’s records in the last ten years, to create an album which, like many of his previous work, is inspired in part by film soundtracks.

As one of the pioneers of electronic music, and one of the most influential musicians of his generation, it seems quite fitting that Eno is making an appearance on Warp, a label which has over the years channelled many of Eno’s followers and has, in its own right, been a vehicle for many defining electronic artists of the last twenty years. That this record actually shares a particular aesthetic with some of these artists will be all the more welcome by most.

The fruit of lengthy improvisation sessions during which the trio aimed primarily at creating a series of sonic landscapes rather than focusing on definite song structures, Small Craft On a Milky Sea is a somewhat colourful and varied collection of small vignettes, most of which are kept under the four minute mark. There is quite a clear progression through the album, from the three delicate atmospheric pieces which open the album to the much more rhythmic series of tracks which follow, starting with the rather harsh and dry Flint March and the darker, textured, Horse and 2 Forms Of Anger, which comes complete with heavy electrical discharges, to the more complex, and often dubbey Bone Jump, Dust Shuffle or Paleosonic, and back to soft-focussed ambient melodies. It is almost as if two very different albums had been assembled into one, but while this could have ended up sounding a tad disjointed, it actually sounds surprisingly coherent.

Combining gentle elegant ambient soundscapes, electronic textures and angular rock forms, the trio create extremely contrasted pieces, and, for the most part of the album, refuse to settle for long on any particular mood. Things change in the last section, when the vaporous and dense Slow Ice, Old Moon signals a radically return to Eno’s exquisite moody musical forms, especially with the wonderfully fluid piano-led Emerald And Stone and ethereal Lesser Heaven and Late Anthropocene, which echo the opening moments of the record an bring the album to a logical conclusion.

With Small Craft On A Milk Sea, Eno brings some of the many themes he has experimented with over the years together under one umbrella, and while it is not exactly the first time, he does so with particular convincingly here. The album benefits greatly of the confident relationship between the three musicians, and if some may regret that they didn’t push a little further into exploratory grounds, this album proves a very enjoyable journey from start to finish.

4/5

Brian Eno | Warp Records
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SQUAREPUSHER
Squarepusher Presents Shobaleader One: d’Demonstrator
WARP196
Warp Records 2010
09 Tracks. 44mins40secs

Amazon UK: CD | LP | DLD US: CD | LP | DLD Boomkat: CD | LP | DLD iTunes: DLD

Do you know Squarepusher? This is what Tom Jenkinson was cheekily asking almost ten years ago, and he’s since regularly deflected preconceptions on his work, which resulted most spectacularly last year with the release of the superb Solo Electric Bass 1 album, which, as its title indicated, stripped his music back down to its most basic component, Jenkinson’s electric bass. With this new album, he moves the goal post once again away from the concussed drill’n'bass playground that he has made his over the years.

This latest affair started when a bunch of kids got in touch with Jenkinson with the prospect of bringing the fictitious band he had dreamt about, which subsequently led to Just A Souvenir two years ago, to life. As preposterous as the idea was for the notoriously lone ranger Jenkinson,, he was intrigued by the audacity of his interlocutors, enough to grant them some time to work together and record some tracks, or so goes the story anyway. The result is d’Demonstrator, a collection of free jazz-infused slo-mo electro-funk tainted with big dollops of off-kilter spaced out disco, and smeared with enough vocoder frills to give Daft Punk a stellar hard on. The Daft Punk synergy goes even further with the LED-faced monk-like figure pictured on the cover of the record as to guard the entrance of a highly selective club.

Things kick off in pretty subdued style with the surprisingly luscious and sensual Plug Me In. In fact, it almost feels as if Jenkinson was simply replugging his instruments at the end of the Solo Electric Bass sessions, just to check whether they were still in working order. Watery bass, sluggish groove and a first vocoder assault, this is not precisely what Squarepusher has got us used to, but it works rather well, and it continues to do so later on on the somewhat funkier and more electrically-charged Endless Night, served by cascading eighties-style keyboard motifs and chords, something which also defines Laser Rock, its fuzzed-up electro eventually imperceptibly pushing the omnipresent vocoder out of the picture for a moment. Later on, Megazine and Maximum Planck increase the pressure, the former by simply quickening the pace, the latter by making it much heavier and greasier. Elsewhere, the mood is distinctly lighter, from the breathy tones of Into The Blue and the overly chilled Frisco Wave to the snaking electro-jazz of Abstract Lover. Far from Jenkinson’s usual incendiary beats or syncopated bass lines, these prove almost uncomfortably catchy.

As the album progresses, its restrictive scope becomes more apparent. The vocoder rapidly proves tiresome, and the album overall feels somewhat too uniform and lacking momentum to make a real impact. Over the years, Jenkinson has tried many settings, more of which have proved interesting if not all entirely successful. Yet, if Solo Electric Bass 1 was exposing Jenkinson in all his virtuosity, d’Demonstrator seems to do exactly the opposite and shows him at his least inspired. Regardless of Shobaleader One actually existing or not, d’Demonstrator ends up being too non-committal, an unfortunate first for Squarepusher

2.4/5

Squarepusher | Squarepusher (MySpace) | Warp Records
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