Seefeel - (Ch-vox) (Redux)

A record born from friendship and mutual admiration, and one of the most hauntingly minimal albums in the Seefeel catalog. When Aphex Twin remixed "Time To Find Me" not once but twice, entirely for free and out of sheer enthusiasm for the band, Mark Clifford and company agreed to make a record for his Rephlex label in return. The result was (Ch-Vox), originally released in November 1996 and available on vinyl for the first time since that original pressing.

By this point Seefeel had already traveled an extraordinary distance from the shoegaze-adjacent warmth of Quique and the rhythmic industrial textures of Succour. (Ch-Vox) took the journey further still, into territory closer to Selected Ambient Works Vol. II than anything the band had previously released. Percussion reduced to a bare minimum, processed guitar and fragmented sounds brought to the fore, the six tracks move through dark, droning soundscapes of considerable beauty and depth. Daren Seymour's bass takes on the quality of an electric piano. Sarah Peacock's voice dissolves into pure texture. The whole record feels less composed than conjured, music that exists somewhere between sleep and waking with complete, unhurried conviction.

Originally bracketed as an EP, the record has long been considered Seefeel's third album in all but name, and this Redux edition makes that case definitively by adding a full extra LP of previously unreleased bonus material mastered from the original DAT transfers by Stefan Betke, the Berlin producer better known as Pole. The package comes housed in a newly designed gatefold sleeve by The Designers Republic, the legendary Sheffield studio responsible for some of the most iconic visual design in electronic music history.

The final chapter of one of the most singular and consistently surprising catalogs in British electronic music, presented in its most complete form.