Brandon Seabrook's "Hellbent Daydream"

Around my house, the producer David Breskin's is a name to conjure with. Breskin cut his teeth working with the titanic drummer-composer Ronald Shannon Jackson in the '80s, and I first met him at Jackson's memorial service in Fort Worth in 2013. Since 2010, he's produced some of my favorite recordings of this century, working with artists like Nels Cline, Ben Goldberg, Kris Davis, Mary Halvorson, Ches Smith, Dan Weiss, and Patricia Brennan, always guiding them to greater heights of compositional and conceptual achievement. 

Breskin's collaboration with guitarist-banjoist-composer Brandon Seabrook began with the octet album brutalovechamp in 2023, and continued the following year with the overdubbed solo outing Object of Unknown Function. While Seabrook continues to work in other contexts (notably a trio with Cooper-Moore and Gerald Cleaver, and Three Layer Cake with Mike Watt and Mike Pride), his latest offering, the Breskin-produced Hellbent Daydream -- out February 20 on Pyroclastic -- is the most accessible gateway yet into his world of surreal and subversive storytelling. 

Like a lot of the most interesting creative music currently on offer, Hellbent Daydream exists at the intersection of genres. It makes sense for musicians to be able to use everything they know in a given musical situation, and that's definitely the case here. The lineup here expands a trio Seabrook's had for years with his longtime collaborator, bassist Henry Fraser, and violinist Erica Dicker (who's also worked with Anthony Braxton, Ingrid Laubrock,  and Jen Shyu) by adding Austrian Elias Stemeseder on piano and synths. While Seabrook's known as a madcap improviser of great physicality, his last couple of albums have highlighted his strength as a composer, and Hellbent Daydream continues along that path. 

What we have here is a sort of electric chamber music, replete with rich harmonies, juiced with improvisation. "Name Dropping is the Lowest Form of Conversation (Waltz)" opens the proceedings with a skewed cinematic sweep, like a Tim Burton movie theme appended with a slashing fuzz guitar solo. "Bespattered Bygones" begins by juxtaposing Appalachian banjo with chamber violin, before the synth weaves strands of sinuous melody around the rhythm and Seabrook solos with some of the abandon that won him the sobriquet "the heavy metal banjo player." 

The title track explores some of the same sonic turf Pat Metheny inhabited during his years of collaboration with Lyle Mays, evoking rustic open skies, but with an ominous undercurrent, leading into the self-explanatory "It's a Nightmare and You Know It." Award for best title here goes to the somber tone poem "Existential Banger Infinity Ceiling." Perhaps the most fully realized track here is "The Arkansas Tattler," which weaves together its threads of rustic Americana and European art music most seamlessly. And the closing "Autopsied Cloudburst" features Seabrook's guitaring at both its most pointillistic and noise-tastic. Under Breskin's aegis, this improvising composer continues to move from strength to strength.