Seefeel’s second album Succour, evolving from the blissful mist of their shoegazing debut Quique, is a near-total deconstruction of the rock assemblage, each instrument reduced to raw material for bandleader Mark Clifford’s obsessive sampling, layering and processing. Bearing the influence of all-nighters at Brixton Academy and the repetitive beats of rave and IDM, Succour sounds like very little else from the mid-1990s, blasting the drenched grooves of My Bloody Valentine into increasingly spaced-out and time-warped zones.

As the first guitar-led act to sign to Warp Records, Seefeel bore the burden of vanguardism – adored by critics and other musicians but under-appreciated by the indie hordes who’d soon be flattened under the wheel of Britpop. A quarter of a century later, the freshness of Succour has barely faded, though its influence can be heard in electronic-rock spawn like Ulrich Schnauss, Jon Hopkins, M83 and Casino Versus Japan.

This month Warp will reissue Succour along with its out-of-print follow-up Ch-Vox (recorded in the same sessions and released on Rephlex in 1996), the EP collection St/Fr/Sp and a four CD anthology Rupt & Flex of the group's recordings of the era. All of the albums contain unreleased bonus material, mastered from original DAT transfers by Stefan Betke aka Pole, and come with new or updated artwork by Designers Republic and sleevenotes by Clifford and singer-guitarist Sarah Peacock. And just as the reissue of Quique in 2007 brought the bandmates back together for the first time in a decade, resulting in the 2010 comeback album Seefeel, this reissue is accompanied by the promise of new Seefeel music and “more bliss,” as Peacock explains.

Chal Ravens: The legend of Seefeel is that you were a band before your time. Critics and other musicians loved it, but the wider public somehow wasn't ready for this electronic deconstruction of rock. How do you remember the initial response to Succour?

Sarah Peacock: Succour kind of confounded what people were expecting from us, because it sounded so different to Quique. People liked the elements of Quique that were quite blissful, and that was a bit absent from Succour. We got into the top ten of the indie chart on the Chart Show on TV and they played a little tiny clip of “Starethrough” with a still photo because we didn't have a video. On most people's tellies back then the sound just disappeared because it was all bass – and bass just didn't register out of the little cathode ray TV, so it was almost silence! There were various things that scuppered us in terms of becoming, you know, a more popular thing for the public.

CR: You were saying that people found it dark – was that your intention?

SP: Absolutely not. I know Mark [Clifford] agrees with me on this. I think tracks like “Cut” and “When Face Was Face” are every bit as blissful as anything on Quique. But you’ve got to have ups and downs, you can't have everything on one one level.

CR: So what did you have in mind?

SP: Well, we didn't really, as far as I remember. By this point Mark was doing almost all of the writing. We had a little studio set-up at home, which we didn't have when we made Quique. The tracks for Succour were mostly worked up by Mark on his own, in our little basement flat, with him on headphones and working through the night. I was sharing a flat with him for some of that time so I got a very good idea about how much time and effort he spent on it. But it was all run past us and we were contributing ideas here and there. I'd record bits of vocals in our bathroom because it had a really nice natural reverb. When we came to finish it we went to September Sound, the Cocteau Twins’ studio, and we were doing very, very long sessions there. By that point there was some personal friction between all of us, so if there was any kind of darkness it was never intentional, but it may have been a bit of an undercurrent.

CR: Before you started these sessions, Aphex Twin had done two remixes of “Time To Find Me”. What did you think of those?

SP: We absolutely loved the remixes, they were amazing. We were so flattered that he took the approach that he did, that he kept so much of the original track, because he was notorious for delivering a remix that was basically just one of his tracks. But he'd heard our stuff and asked if he could do it. I wouldn't say that we'd stopped going to see bands and gigs, but we were going to more and more raves. The all-nighters at Brixton Academy were our favorite thing to do. It felt more exciting to us, it felt more like we wanted to sound – to be doing that rather than strumming away with guitars.

CR: Did you have any reservations about being the more guitar-led act on a label that was associated with cutting-edge electronic music?

SP: No, we didn't really. It felt good to us, a bit subversive. We were immensely flattered when [Warp] came to see us play. We were fans of so much stuff that they put out.

CR: Listening to these records for the first time, it's not immediately obvious that this is a band with a singer. What were you doing with your voice in the studio?

SP: By the time we'd worked up a few demos and started to edge towards a more electronic direction, it had evolved into a thing where instead of trying to be the singer, writing and singing songs, I was just joining in as an instrument, sort of like the way a lot of the ravey dance records at the time would have one repeated line: “Gonna take you higher!” So it's my little indie version of that. When Mark did what became “Starethrough”, he constructed a vocal out of samples. To an untrained ear it wouldn't even sound like a vocal at all, it could be a synth patch or something.

CR: It's an interesting trajectory that you were on – away from rock performance and towards a sort of anonymity, with the cryptic track titles and the artwork for Succour referencing the periodic table.

SP: The titles came from our little in-jokes and wordplay. Mark's a big fan of Samuel Beckett and the way the words are sort of half-formed and opaque, or cut-up and very stream of consciousness. So the meaning is either hidden very, very deeply or else it's right out there. Most of the time we were just trying to muck around. There were so many in-jokes. Daren [Seymour, bassist] was the instigator of so much of that stuff – he was the mood lightener and the one who had the phrases and the malapropisms that would keep us all entertained. It spread as well. We would go and do these weekend festivals in some European city and bump into the same people again and again, like Autechre and Russell Haswell, and they were so much fun to hang out with.

CR: What were you doing as a guitarist at this point?

SP: I really only played guitar live. Mark created all of that stuff with various vintage effects boxes that he would be pushing to extremes and looping and sampling. “Treatments” was always our word for it. There's a little in-joke on the sleeve: “Ever get the feeling you've been treated?” Which is a throwback to the line at the end of The Great Rock ’N’ Roll Swindle. So yeah, “treatments” was semi-serious but we found it quite amusing that it was a bit pretentious, you know? That was his approach to creating sounds from a guitar. People would kill to find out what his gear set-up was, but he's always been quite guarded about that.

CR: Did the studio belong to the Cocteaus or did they just use it?

SP: The building was owned by Pete Townshend, who we saw once or twice in the late night shopper, glumly walking around with his trolley. [Cocteau Twins] had the upstairs and I think they ended up taking it over from him a few years down the line. In the loft of the studio Robin Guthrie had his gear graveyard, he would tease Mark about it: “One day I'll let you up there.” And he did eventually, it probably wasn't that long after we started working there. The only thing that I really remember was they had a CD burner, which was way off being affordable for anyone else. We’d burn off CDs to go and listen to which was pretty cool. We were using their mics – they had really nice expensive mics – but it was mostly Mark’s arsenal of stuff that he was building up.

CR: Are the tracks from 1996’s Ch-Vox from the same sessions?

SP: Kind of, and some of them were made at home as well. I don't really remember if they were before or after, but they were around about the same time. It was always an idea that we were going to do a record for [Rephlex]. It's something that Richard [D James] asked us to do – you know, if I do these [remixes] for you, you can give us a record for our label. We thought it would be funny to give Rephlex the darker, more challenging things that we felt didn't fit in Succour.

CR: How long were you actually in the studio?

SP: I found a load of old diaries from the time – I say diaries, they're more like “Monday: sign on, Tuesday: studio” – but it was several months over 1994. Earlier that year we did the Britronica Festival, which has been written about quite a lot since – there's some great footage of it, a great clip of Bark Psychosis. And me and Justin [Fletcher, drummer] did a press trip to New York at about the same time, which is the first time I'd ever been to America. Justin met the woman that he went on to marry who was working at the label. So that year started with some really momentous things happening. We went on tour with the Cocteaus around Europe and the UK. I think it was going into 1995, when we toured with Spiritualized, when it started to go bad for us.

CR: Simon Reynolds wrote an article for The Wire in 1994 on the emerging post-rock movement, as he’d dubbed it, with Seefeel featuring alongside artists like Kevin Martin, Robert Hampson and Disco Inferno. What did you make of his analysis?

SP: We were friendly with a lot of [those artists]. We knew Robert Hampson and I'd been a big fan of Loop. We did a double headline gig with Main at The Garage [in London] which was a really important gig for us, in terms of our evolution and just getting seen and known. I think we felt that we had more affinity with people like that than we did the kind of hippy rave, Megatripolis kind of things. We would go and do those [events] as well, but it really wasn't what we were about at all. It was almost a punks versus hippies thing, and post-rock seemed more punk, or post-punk.

CR: The last time you reissued a record, in 2007, you and Mark ended up making more Seefeel music again. Is there any possibility of that happening again?

SP: Yes, there is stuff being made, but I don't know when it's going to come out. There’s definitely a thread of sounds that are new, that we haven't really done before. Again, it's 90 per cent Mark's work. And what I'm contributing to it he's happy with too. So it's a step on, it's different again. A lot of the sound of the comeback album [2010’s Seefeel] had a shoegaze influence, and that isn't there now. There's more bliss on this new stuff.

Subscribers to The Wire can read Simon Reynolds's original articles on UK post-rock and US post-rock via our online archive. Seefeel's Rupt And Flex (1994–96), St / Fr / Sp, (Ch-Vox) Redux and Succour (Redux) are released by Warp.