brutalovechamp
Brandon Seabrook
Pyroclastic Records PR27 (store.pyroclasticrecords.com)
Brandon Seabrook is known to be a composer who eschews both sonic norms and overheated emotion. But on brutalovechamp he seems to tear up that musical playbook, to turn his own insides out and even bare his soul. These are works, seemingly like musical shards of raw emotion. You don’t really need to unscramble the three-word mash-up of the title or reach the end of the booklet to discover that Seabrook was gutted by the loss of man’s best friend, his dog Champ.
Seabrook creates dizzying layering-on of tonal cadences, mixing guitar, mandolin and banjo, into the low instrumentation of bass recorder, alto, B-flat and contrabass clarinets and two contrabasses. Into this he has a cellist pour liquid notes, while the ensemble glimmers, redolent of a myriad of percussion instruments. This unusual collision of timbre creates a musical feast for the senses.
If Seabrook means for you to feel the evocations of his pain at losing his beloved dog, then this you certainly do up close and personal on brutalovechamp. This is all inward-looking music, raw in a Jean-Paul Sartre-esque, existential sort of way. And although Seabrook may be averse to labels, some works cannot escape sonic allusions to the symbolists like Arthur Rimbaud, in for instance, Gutbucket Asylum. But make no mistake, every piece of music on this recording bears the authentic imprint of Seabrook’s feral sound palette.
