The Brag

SEEKAE

We’re all amateur singers at home, yes? Much more than private guitarists we sing alone, crackling towards unavailable notes. This then is the pleasure of seeing someone do it live and well; hit those highs that we all scratchily strain to achieve, the connection where our own vocal chords dip and gulp to meet the singer on stage. For an instrumental band (and not a DJ, not someone providing the dance track) to make that connection with a crowd is a test, especially if the players devote their performance to downcast eyes, twiddling and fiddling on sequencers and screens.

Like some sugar-stuffed child reaching to register subtle flavour tones on his tongue, my mind will always try to graft story onto voiceless songs, pairing them with imagery that would never occur had there been vocals in place. A philistine kid raised on pop instead of classical. So how then to visually score Sydney’s Seekae? Perhaps an HBO-lush and serious take on The Legend of Zelda, futuristic and retro, the human journey of an 8-bit boy. Seekae’s sonic toolbag seems sourced from the other-worldly, and this is heightened outside the headphones’ sphere. What living sound-grabs there are feel laboratory-twisted, processed and fed and regurgitated. It’s often the oozing, tweaking bleeps that are the easiest to emotionally connect to.

The difference between recorded and live for Seekae has to be the nonstop sense of focus in the tracks – never before meandering in scope, in the flesh each song pounds onwards, the triptych of bobbing heads amidst the mist onstage leading a charge towards some pixelated destination. Lost along the way is the playful noodling, the crooning tunes of some ’70s sci-fi ‘bot. Highlighted are the harsher clicks and tacks, the teeth grinds and dislocations, those sounds of an organic transformation. Brief interludes of melodica humanise the proceedings, but the scuffed beats proceed throughout.

If Seekae went huge, if this music swept through the mainstream like the Presets did a couple of years ago, then they could do worse than have the tale of the fire alarm in their past. Each and every punter present shifted gears to realise that the wails and warnings from the loudspeakers were not sampled by the band, but a recording that would ebb and flow on the beat for the next five songs, until it was disarmed. Seekae played through the sirens and the smog, and the floor of the Manning Bar followed them forwards.

Matt Roden