BRANDON SEABROOK / SIMON NABATOV - Voluptuaries
Leo Records CD LR 894
Brandon Seabrook, guitar; Simon Nabatov, piano
Recorded at LOFT studios, Cologne, Germany, November 4th 2019
Voluptuaries is a dozen tracks of sometimes super-fast, improvised music, sometimes considerably fragmented by sudden asides, deviations, supplementary observations and annotations. The recipe here is abstraction and is necessarily constructed around rhythm rather than melody, best illustrated perhaps in Squalid Simplicities.
Both musicians are highly technical and highly skilled protagonists: they do seem to be offering conflict against each other, but both are more than adequate for any such challenge, and they seem to be striking a chord for a peace pact. It is perhaps the speed of much that is played that lends to the music the description ‘hyperactive’ or ‘impulsive’, such is its energy, its excitement.
There is an exquisite unpredictability, an arbitrariness here that secretly whispers “we know where we are going, but don’t want to tell you”. The nature of that is akin to the nature of a child’s sense of fun, high spirits, innocence, joy and playfulness, that are underscored in the supplication of these bizarre, acoustic environments. They describe, maybe, the place where the guitar and piano find themselves, an auditory individuality or reminiscence, pertinent to the place and time in which they are heard.
Reviewed by Ken Cheetham
Leo Records CD LR 894
Brandon Seabrook, guitar; Simon Nabatov, piano
Recorded at LOFT studios, Cologne, Germany, November 4th 2019
Voluptuaries is a dozen tracks of sometimes super-fast, improvised music, sometimes considerably fragmented by sudden asides, deviations, supplementary observations and annotations. The recipe here is abstraction and is necessarily constructed around rhythm rather than melody, best illustrated perhaps in Squalid Simplicities.
Both musicians are highly technical and highly skilled protagonists: they do seem to be offering conflict against each other, but both are more than adequate for any such challenge, and they seem to be striking a chord for a peace pact. It is perhaps the speed of much that is played that lends to the music the description ‘hyperactive’ or ‘impulsive’, such is its energy, its excitement.
There is an exquisite unpredictability, an arbitrariness here that secretly whispers “we know where we are going, but don’t want to tell you”. The nature of that is akin to the nature of a child’s sense of fun, high spirits, innocence, joy and playfulness, that are underscored in the supplication of these bizarre, acoustic environments. They describe, maybe, the place where the guitar and piano find themselves, an auditory individuality or reminiscence, pertinent to the place and time in which they are heard.
Reviewed by Ken Cheetham
