Seefeel - Succour (Redux)

The missing link between shoegaze and IDM, back on vinyl for the first time since its original release and expanded with an entire additional LP of bonus material. Released in March 1995, Succour is Seefeel's second studio album and their debut for Warp Records, and the distance it had traveled from Quique in just two years was remarkable. Where their debut had navigated a course between shoegaze and ambient dub, Succour found the electronic undercurrents of their sound carrying them somewhere far stranger and more uncompromising.

The influence of Aphex Twin runs through the album with unmistakable clarity. His remixes of Seefeel material in the interim period had honed in on the clean-lined rhythmic skeleton lurking beneath their atmospheric swirl, and the band followed that logic to its conclusion. The rolling, distorted drums of "Fracture" and "Vex" are straight out of that playbook, while the beatless bookending tracks "Meol" and "Utreat" evoke the most ethereal passages of Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, dissolving into pure texture and space. Between those poles the album moves through dense, unsettling terrain that rewards patient and attentive listening with genuine depth and surprise.

This expanded Redux edition adds a full third LP of bonus material drawn from original DAT transfers, mastered by Stefan Betke, the Berlin-based producer and engineer better known as Pole, whose own work with analog warmth and careful low-end makes him an ideal custodian of this material. The first time Succour has been available on vinyl since its original pressing, and an essential companion to the Quique double LP reissue.