Seefeel - St/Fr/Sp (2LP)

Seefeel’s St/Fr/Sp is one of those releases that makes you wonder how something this singular ever slipped through the cracks. It gathers the band’s trio of 1994 Warp EPs, Starethrough, Fracture/Tied, and Spangle, into a tidy, hypnotic arc that shows just how gracefully they bridged shoegaze, dub and the early pulse of IDM. Released by Warp in 2021, the set feels less like a nostalgia trip and more like a reminder that the edges of guitar music were being re-drawn in real time back then, often by people who didn’t seem to care much about boundaries at all.

Starethrough opens the door with that signature Seefeel drift, a shimmer of processed guitar loops that hover like sea mist over a calm bass tide. Mark Clifford’s textures don’t announce themselves so much as unfurl, and Sarah Peacock’s voice appears as a distant light rather than a centrepiece, wordless and cool, part human, part synthesiser. There is rhythm, but it’s all about suggestion, the kind of pulse that makes your shoulders sway without you noticing. You can hear why Warp took a chance on this band at a time when the label was best known for machines. The music is electronic in spirit, but its backbone is the sound of strings and fingers, stretched and blurred until the source becomes a riddle.

Fracture/Tied pushes a little harder, the drums stepping forward with a tougher snap and the loops taking on a serrated edge. Fracture rolls like clockwork assembled in a dream, one of those tracks that feels both tightly engineered and slightly haunted. Tied eases back into a more aquatic zone, bass and hiss knitting together until the whole thing becomes a soft-focus throb. What impresses most is how little the group needed to say to make it land. A few cycling motifs, a careful shift in tone colour, and suddenly you’re three minutes deeper than you thought, chasing harmonics that vanish as soon as you reach for them.

Spangle is the secret heart of the set, and for many fans it is the keeper. The title track glows with a patient, high-frequency dazzle, like light playing on the surface of a lake at dusk. It’s gentle but not sleepy, meditative but full of tiny events that reward close listening. Autechre’s involvement in this era has become part of the lore, and the remix they turned in around Spangle cemented a dialogue between two of Warp’s most quietly radical acts. Hearing the original in this context, you catch how carefully Seefeel set the table for that kind of deconstruction, leaving space around each element so the music could be folded and reimagined without breaking.

Taken together, these sides make a strong case for Seefeel as one of the few groups who truly fused guitar culture with the language of club music, without leaning on gimmicks or chasing trends. Before and after this period, they earned the respect of peers like Aphex Twin, who remixed their work early on, and would follow St/Fr/Sp’s era with the austere, beautiful Succour in 1995. But it’s here that their palette feels the most balanced, the dubby low end and soft-shoegaze haze locked into a sweet spot that still sounds fresh. Spin it next to contemporary ambient techno and it holds its own, not as a museum piece, but as living, breathing music.

The 2021 compilation gave these tracks a proper home on long-playing wax, and St/Fr/Sp vinyl is a lovely way to live with them. The low frequencies bloom on a decent system, and the negative space around the loops is almost tactile. If you’re hunting Seefeel vinyl, this set is the most satisfying place to start, since it captures their shift to Warp with clarity and avoids the bloat that sometimes comes with expanded editions. It also plays well as a front-to-back listen, which isn’t always the case with EP roundups.

If you’re crate digging in a Melbourne record store, keep an eye out, though you can also buy Seefeel records online without too much drama these days. Among Seefeel albums on vinyl, this one has become a quiet favourite for home listening, the kind of record that resets the room without demanding attention, then reels you in for late-night detail hunting. For anyone building a thoughtful shelf of vinyl records Australia wide, St/Fr/Sp feels essential. It captures a moment when Warp’s orbit widened and a band of guitar minimalists found a new language, one loop at a time.