Richard Seeley has spent years building a considered catalogue that favours atmosphere, detail and a little unease over easy grooves. As founder of Glue Music, he has given space to underground voices including Bruno Pronsato, DeWalta and Terry Francis, while his own productions have found homes on Rekids’ Rek’d and Veryverywrongindeed. Now, with the launch of Strip Tone Records, Seeley turns the focus firmly towards his first love: the shadowy, stripped-back world of minimal.
Ominous Beauty is both his debut album and the opening statement for the new label. A connection more than 15 years in the making, it draws on an instinct for hypnotic grooves and intricate sound design as Seeley explores the fine line between tension and allure. He finds something strangely beautiful in that unsettling world and embraces the appeal of late-night darkness.
Opener ‘Lushroom’ takes you to the heart of that sound world with paranoid vocal whispers lurking behind sinewy tones and predatory rhythms, then ‘Move It’ brings afterparty swing and hi-fidelity abstraction. ‘Liminal’ has spectral synths and ghostly trails sketching out an otherworldly future and ‘Sprinkle Tone’ rides a kinked and loopy rhythm that soon hypnotises. ‘Elegance’ has a floaty feel, ‘Darling London’ is a primordial soup of intricate complexities and off-centre textures with an underlying sense of threat and, lastly, Portsmouth-based micro-house talent PiNG (UK) remixes ‘Move It’ into a lithe, undulating dub for full-bodied immersion.
Richard Seeley’s Ominous Beauty LP comes via Strip Tone Records on 14th December 2026.
Tracklist
1. Lushroom
2. Move It
3. Liminal
4. Sprinkle Tone
5. Elegance
6. Darling London
7. Move it – PiNG (UK) Remix
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