Seefeel - Quique (Redux)

Seefeel started in early 1992 as a fairly ordinary rock band and got bored almost immediately. Within months Mark Clifford, Justin Fletcher, Sarah Peacock, and Darren Seymour had thrown out lyrics and choruses in favor of loops and programming, and by October 1993 they had Quique, a debut that no one else in Britain was making and that everyone in ambient techno has been chasing since.

The trick was combining two scenes that were not speaking to each other. Seefeel took the smeared guitars and weightless vocals of shoegaze and dream pop and set them over the rhythmic architecture of electronic dance music, mostly instrumental, deeply indebted to dub in the way everything sits in the low end and decays. It is a record built from texture rather than song structure, hypnotic across its full length, and it landed at number 12 on the UK Independent Albums Chart on release.

The reach has been long. Seefeel remain the only act ever invited to remix Cocteau Twins, and their fingerprints show up in Boards of Canada, Ulrich Schnauss, early Aphex Twin, and Tom Middleton. Quique now sits alongside Selected Ambient Works and Chill Out as one of the defining ambient records of its era.

Quique Redux first appeared in 2007 as an expanded edition, and this 2CD version brings it back newly remastered by Geoff Pesche at Abbey Road with new artwork. It pairs the original album with nine bonus tracks, including remixes and previously unreleased material. The most complete version of a record that has been hard to find in any form for years.