Guitarist and banjoist Brandon Seabrook contributes to many a project, usually things that involve aggressive improvisation and the ability not to take themselves too seriously. For his latest album Object of Unknown Function, he goes it alone, gathering six- and twelve-string guitars, a tenor banjo, a cassette recorder, and a six-string guitar banjo from the 1920s to create his own eccentric sonic world.
It likely goes without saying that he doesn’t play the banjo like a bluegrass player. Instead he plucks and claws at the strings as if he’s discovering the instrument for the first time, wringing tunes out of it like he’s extracting its veins with a clawhammer. Similarly, his guitar work wrangles repetitive riffs, mantra-like rhythms, and a casual disregard for any kind of conventional playing, and he’s eager to use found sounds (i.e. samples from a non-digital recording source) not so much to fill out his layering as interrupt it. You’d expect the small armies of strings Seabrook amasses to fall tangled into a giant ball on the floor, but somehow Seabrook keeps his tracks distinctive and even melodic, weaving in and out of each other’s sonic spaces on “The Historical Importance of Eccentricity,” “Gondola Freak,” and “Melodic Incidents for an Irrational World.”. Like a progressive jazz player who just discovered outsider folk music and can’t wait to give it a shot, Seabrook quickly inhabits his pocket dimension, but keeps the door kicked open so we can all hear the noises emanating from it.
