Seefeel, "Sky Hooks" (Warp Records)

There's an offshoot of the British electronic group the Future Sound of London called Amorphous Androgynous, and that phrase accurately describes another English band, Seefeel. Led by guitarist/composer Mark Clifford and guitarist/vocalist Sarah Peacock, Seefeel have been sublimely blurring the lines between rock and electronic music for over 30 years—with some long hiatuses between releases. Their 1993 album Quique is a rarefied fusion of shoegaze rock, ambient, and dub that stands with My Bloody Valentine's much-more-ballyhooed Loveless as an exemplar of innovative bliss-mongering.

After Quique, Seefeel largely ventured into frosty, sharp-angled electronic-music territory and never quite attained the heights of that LP and the More Like Space and Starethrough EPs. Following a 14-year break, Seefeel returned in 2011 with a self-titled album that signaled a welcome comeback. In a review of the record for The Stranger, I wrote, "[Seefeel have] combined traits from their shoegaze and IDM phases into a vastly rewarding new hybrid, achieving a kind of angelic ominousness that very few artists can pull off."

Staying true to form, Seefeel went another 13 years without releasing new music. Now they've broken their dry spell with "Sky Hooks" (probably not a reference to NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's favorite shot). It's the first taste from Everything Squared (out August 30), a six-track mini-album that the label PR says "presents a contemporary evolution of their trademark sound." That's good news. 

"Sky Hooks" immediately rivets with that Seefeel ca. 1993 minted diaphanous-dub pressure. Peacock's voice is pitched up to a helium coo, a feathery delight amid the tectonic-plate-shifting bass (perhaps by Shigeru Ishihara, who played on the last album), elephant-heartbeat pulse, and striated clouds of poignant guitar drifting eight kilometers high.

The lyrics remain opaque, but that's okay. Peacock's ethereal timbre provides more than enough pleasure, and Seefeel have never been a band hell-bent on imparting messages. Rather, their music has always existed beyond language and meaning; you simply (and complexly) feel it all around you, like a cocoon made of sea spray and stardust. "Sky Hooks" bodes very well for the rest of Everything Squared.

Blevin Blectum, "Anti-Venom" (Deathbomb Arc)

Now based in the tiny California city of Willits, former Seattle electronic-music innovator Blevin Blectum (aka Bevin Kelley) returns to the fray with what may be her strangest batch of music in a career overflowing with weirdness. I mean that in the best way possible. 

The follow-up to last year's superb, otherworldly OMNII, Multitudes of Venom (out August 16 on cassette and digitally) consists of two long tracks that will test the mettle of the most headstrong listeners. (I mean that in the best way possible, too.)

The cassette's B-side, "Anti-Venom," is 15 minutes of what I assume is analog and digital mayhem (one never knows with Blevin Blectum exactly where the sounds come from and how they're magicked into the air). She builds a tower of manipulated babble that's tweaked to optimize your freakout, and then composes an ultra-vivid, rapidly morphing stream of sonic events that emulate the closest you'll ever get to experiencing a DMT trip without ingesting anything. Once again, impossibly complex xylophone motifs cascade through the intricate beats like a pixie-dusted Harry Partch composition. The tape's equally epic A-side, "Venom," is even odder. If you need a quick escape hatch from reality, this track acts instantly. 

Back in the '90s, this sort of thing would have been called "IDM," a catchall term for any electronic music that lacked conventional functionality and made your brain spasm and feel funny. Now, Blevin Blectum's output more closely resembles the crazy dataflow aesthetic of Negativland, and the vertiginous mental roller-coaster ride that that entails. Whatever you want to call it, you'd best gird your gray matter for one helluva journey.