Succour [Import]

Seefeel, Seefeel | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Import
• Label: Warp Records
• ASIN: B0000566GO
• Also Available in: Audio CD
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #723,711 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Was it luck or genius?, March 5, 2001

By 

Stephen Saunders (O'CONNOR, ACT Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Succour (Audio CD)

It remains a mystery where this breathtaking album came from. Earlier albums, like Quique, by English band Seefeel were good but not great. Later albums by leader Mark Clifford (as Disjecta or Sneakster) and by other Seefeel members (as Scala) do not seem to scale the heights.

Yet, on this one occasion in 1995, Mark Clifford mixed and arranged his wordless compositions into a monumental album of the 1990s. Succour sits in splendid musical isolation. There is very little that comes before it, although it briefly resembles a great English band of the 1980s (The Lines), and seemingly nothing that comes after it.

It is pointless to call this techno or ambient, although that's about where it comes from. We should love The Byrds because they were simply the best, not because they were good at folk-rock. Similarly, you have to put aside genres (and I'm no great techno fan) and love this album because it is simply the best.

Although Succour is the title, there is a very persistent feeling of anxiety and mourning in this music. Using dreamlike, skittering keyboards and ethereal vocals over insistently repetitive figures of percussion or chimes, Clifford builds weird soundscapes that are reminiscent of crossing a cold planetary plain (Meol), being marooned in a distant jungle landscape (Gatha), or crossing the Styx itself (When Face Was Face). Just once or twice (Ruby-Ha and Cut), the precious stone of love shines out through the planetary gloom.

You can't play this often and you can't play it at dinner parties. It almost seems to concentrate in one tiny point all the grief we feel in life. But you may feel a strange ecstasy when you get to the other side of Clifford's icy river of sound.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars blip<ssssshhh>scritch, March 12, 2002

By 

R. Lister "burblet" (Palo Alto, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Succour (Audio CD)

lost gem is a bit of cliche, but I always felt baffled that this album appeared from nowhere, plopped into the meme pool of music almost without a ripple and sank from sight. Amazon don't even have a photo.

it's great - quiet, rhymic, engaging - the perfect companion piece to the icy soundscapes of Aphex Twin SAW1, but somehow with a warmer heart. All the sounds are sparse, mechanical and electronic, but there's an analog heart beating under the surface. Succour is alive with hums, tones and whistles, like the fuzz on an AM station, the tracks pop by and the album finishes too soon, again.

Obviously not destined to spawn hit singles (though it occasionally threatens to get distinctly funky), but it's a real nugget if you like BOC, Autechre, Aphex, Locust and other electronica poster boys.