Brandon Seabrook is not a reluctant solo performer. Besides his various ensembles and appearances with other musicians, he keeps up a steady habit of playing concerts with only an electric guitar and, maybe, a banjo for company. But he doesn’t make solo records very often; Object Of Unknown Function is his first in a decade.
One reason for that may be the challenge of translating the shock of his solo music to a recording. In concert, each piece is a hurtling, winding trip, veering between genre intimation and structural notions at a pace so fierce that it makes you wonder if a misplaced lick might cause a wipeout that’d take out a wall of the club. If you look away from his frantically mobile fingers for a moment, you might notice that he wrangles his torrents of sound with relatively little pedal enhancement; in a time when many musicians attach their pedals to boards bigger than a briefcase, Seabrook could fit all of his into a shaving kit.
So, when it came time to make Object Of Unknown Function, Seabrook did not just get a pristine recording of a concert. That would never convey the simultaneous complexity and clarity of the album’s 10 pieces, which have been in his repertoire for a while. Instead, he went for a hyperreal approach. Not only did he stack up guitar, banjo and tape tracks, he put contact mics on his body and the bodies of his instruments. The point is, you might not be able to see him sway and contort his frame as he twists sound around, but you should be able to sense it.
Laying aside the matters of why and how, there’s still the matter of what these tracks sound like. Each is a sequence of discrete moments, which Seabrook negotiates with jump-cut abruptness. Chords curve, patterns skitter and passages turn with a wicked torque; when the music hits a plateau of feedback or bowed strings, the relief is immense. The recording strategies never call attention to themselves, they’re just there to make the events that Seabrook creates with 10 fingers and six or 12 strings truly pop. [Pyroclastic]
—Bill Meyer
