epic proportions, Seabrook’s stunning and malleable octet includes percussionist and vocalist Nava Dunkelman, cellist Marika Hughes, bassists Eivind Opsvik and Henry Fraser, electronic musician and vocalist Chuck Bettis, John McCowen on clarinets and recorders, and Sam Ospovat on drums, vibraphone and percussion.
Welding together elements from punk, jazz, pop, and metal, Seabrook revels in abrasive textures, paint-peeling virtuosity, and angularity so severe as to draw blood at the touch. But his Pyroclastic Records debut, brutalovechamp, is a different beast entirely. No less bold or bracing than his more confrontational work, the album trades the corrosive for the lyrical, venturing into areas of beauty and deeply personal emotion with the same intrepid spirit of exploration that Seabrook’s music has always thrived upon. Bringing the vigor and aggressive eclecticism of his past ensembles to a more heartfelt and harmonically exploratory work. It’s a bold leap forward that doesn’t abandon his brutalist past so much as uncover unexpected depths at its emotional core.
Few bands in improvised music seem to generate more palpable sonic friction than Brandon Seabrook’s trio with Cooper-More and Gerald Cleaver. The group produces a seriously tactile, almost psychedelic sound: the gut-punch of drums, the rumbling twang of diddley-bow, and the slashing, brittle crunch of electric guitar. On Exulations, the trio’s 2020 debut album on Astral Spirits, these sounds coalesced into gritty, propulsive improvisations possessed of an almost three-dimensional physicality. Those rhythmic and melodic fragments came together with puzzle-piece logic, like an aural Rubik’s cube, but one that never stopped moving. On the trio’s hotly anticipated follow-up In the Swarm and group has broadened its timbre with Seabrook’s banjo ad Cleaver’s electronics, and they’ve upped the ante with some thrilling post-production maneuvers that either further expand the sonic palette or turn the modus operandi upside down.