Seabrook, Brandon - Sylphid Vitalizers vinyl lp + download card (due to size and weight, this price for the USA only. Outside of the USA, the price will be adjusted as needed)
SKU
New Atlantis NA-LP-005
"Sylphid Vitalizers is the debut full-length from New York-based banjo/guitar shredder, Brandon Seabrook. Named "NYC's Best Guitarist of 2012" by the Village Voice, his work has been profiled by NPR, The Wall Street Journal, Fret Board Journal, and the UK avant-music magazine, Wire. Seabrook's work typically reflects the energy, dissonance, and hardworking ethos of the creative rock underground, without falling victim to the aesthetic constraints of scene or genre. Sylphid Vitalizers is no exception, harnessing hyperreal technique and impeccable articulation to stratify ecstatic cacophony, bridging the realms of extreme rock and the classical avant-garde. Recognized by the New York Times as "a man apparently hellbent on earning the title of World's Least Rustic Banjo Player." Seabrook�s aggressive punk appropriation of the four-stringed banjo is abundantly evidenced on Sylphid Vitalizers. Album opener 'Ballad of Newfangled Vicissitudes' opens with a series of multi-tracked, dissonant modulations, somewhat reminiscent of the classic guitar orchestras of Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham, before cresting the heavens and laying waste to the stratosphere. The tune is constructed on a framework that bookends expanses of wide-open texture with dissonant, startlingly fast runs, punctuated by pummeling drums (credited only to the enigmatic "Dr. Vitalizer").
The guitar work is equally formidable, rendering terms like 'shred' and 'speed picking' laughably inchoate. 'Cabeza Spams & Aural Championships' opens with chromatic flurries in lockstep with the programmed drums before transfiguring into a set of stacked chords, blossoming in both intensity and surreal beauty, manifesting an hallucinatory landscape. 'Mucoidal Woolgathering' is another blistering piece for banjo, marrying a prolapsing, tumbling pentatonic run to layers of gnarled droning banjo before spiraling out of orbit. Even when the music is at the peak of density and freneticism, the music is executed with inhuman precision and dexterity."
- LabelNew Atlantis
- UPC65969628701