Convulsionaries by Brandon Seabrook

From the idiosyncratic musical mind of guitarist/composer Brandon Seabrook comes his latest album Convulsionaries (Astral Spirits, Fall 2018). In his close to two decades in NYC, Seabrook has garnered international acclaim for his sui generis approach to the electric guitar, one which astounds with tremolo pyrotechnics and an entropic, miasmic sensibility. While those elements are in full effect on Convulsionaries, they’re met with a mature and thorough sense of dynamics, pace, groove, and feeling. Joining Seabrook on this release are the young upright bassist Henry Fraser (Anthony Coleman, The Full Salon) and Daniel Levin (Tony Malaby, Mat Maneri), two revolutionary string players who have been working in various creative ensembles in Brooklyn for years. Together, the string trio tackle Seabrook’s thorny compositions, which perpetually surprise and unseat the listener throughout the album’s proceedings. Seabrook's imaginative compositions are a study turning a sense of impeding doom into cathartic releases, allowing equal space for improvisation and rigid execution of the complex scores. The ensemble ransacks the history of their respective instruments, bringing light to new timbres and exposing their untapped percussive capabilities. What we have with Convulsionaries is the sound of three restless virtuosos, making a bold statement, guiding listeners through a gauntlet of emotional spaces with the aid of these structural assemblages, turning impending doom into a deep cathartic release.