The second album from guitarist Brandon Seabrook's Trio with Gerald Cleaver on drums & pulsating & punctuating electronics, Cooper-Moore providing massive and unconvential bass sounds on his Diddley Bow, and Seabrook himself playing banjo in inexplicably rapid and staccato runs or electric guitar with eccentric effects; rip-roaring, sometimes surreal, absolutely superb!
Format: LP Condition: New Released: 2022 Country: USA Packaging: LP Recorded at Menegroth, in Queens, New York, in July, August and Septe,ber, 2021, by Colin Marston.
"Few bands in improvised music seem to generate more palpable sonic friction than Brandon Seabrook's trio with Cooper-Moore 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, the group has broadened its timbre with Seabrook's banjo and 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."-Astral Spirits
"With electictic instrumentation including a banjo and a diddley-bow (the primitive one-string contraption that sat at the heart of early blues), you might expect this session to be some kind of front-porch country-folk jam. YouÕd be wrong Ð unless the locale in question was famous for its backwoods psychedelics lab and experimental FM radio station. The opening title track announces the trioÕs wayward intentions with Seabrook coaxing crystalline tones from the banjo with a bow before hunkering into crabbed, brittle fretwork full of crazed detail, while Cooper-Moore (usually known, of course, as a pianist) supplies a wonky, lumbering diddley-bow bass line and Cleaver rides an insistent rim-shot rhythm. Add clouds of rumbling electronics and weÕre a long way from Kansas, Toto.
On ÔVibrancy Yourself,Õ Seabrook switches to electric guitar Ð treated with a weirdly muffled modulation Ð chopping out jagged gashes that lead the Ôbow and drums into a discordant, Beefheartian clatter. ÔCrepuscule of CleaverÕ digs even deeper, hocking up a sickly yellow puddle of robot vomit while the rhythm section flails in jerky, stop-start abandon. Proof, if any were needed, that all three musicians are among the most daring and versatile currently operating in creative music."-Daniel Spicer, JazzWise