#daniel higgs

How can you make two strangely transcendent songs originally written and recorded by Lungfish even more metaphysically oblique? Apparently, you set Will Oldham (appearing here under his long-standing Bonnie “Prince” Billy appellation), Nathan Salsburg and Tyler Trotter to work, with few limitations on studio time. The two album-side-long covers — of “Hear the Children Sing” from Lungfish’s Love Is Love (2003), and of “The Evidence” from Pass and Stow (1994) — find a weirding place, somewhere between transfixing and trance-like. The effect is more magical and peculiar than any of those adjectives can suggest.

instagram story by frankieromustdie

Daniel HIGGS

"The Fools Sermon, part 1"

(LP. Ideologic Organ. 2016 / rec. 2015) [US]

Every Record I Own - Day 558: Daniel Higgs Say God

Art is taking something in your head and putting it in someone else’s head.

When we criticize art, we’re criticizing the artist’s ability to transfer that idea from their head into another person’s head, though there is no artistry in telling a tired joke and no artistry in telling a predictable story. To uniformly convey an idea to any given individual is to aim for the lowest common denominator. Thus, every artist is faced with the dilemma of selecting their audience, because if what you have to say resonates with every human being on the planet, it’s likely not particularly profound. Conversely, if your idea doesn’t resonate with anyone, you’ve failed at art’s prime objective.

We’ve surrounded ourselves with music to the point where a lot of it is rendered inert. You can play a minor key melody on a violin and everyone will know you’re sad, but people won’t actually feel sad listening to it. So at least part of the artistry of music involves using contextual sonic shorthands (say, the inherent moods in an acoustic guitar versus a dimed-out full stack-backed guitar) while also toying with expectations, introducing new elements, pairing dissimilar attributes, and other variations of employing and subverting traditions.  

And this is why we have such specific tastes and why we will likely never have mega-stars on the scale of past legends. Our needs and wants are different. Beyond that, our utility of music is enormously varied. You won’t want to listen to some narrative-driven hip-hop while reading a novel and you won’t want to listen to some super heady experimental music at a crowded noisy party. One of my big gripes with contemporary music criticism is that it rarely addresses how suited the intended utility of the music is towards the reviewer. We operate under the assumption that the reviewer is knowledgeable, open-minded, and pre-disposed to wrangling enjoyment out of their subject. We’re also supposed to assume that the writer has listened attentively and is in a receptive state. And we are meant to assume that if the reviewer doesn’t like their subject, then it had nothing to do with their own shortcomings as a listener and everything to do with the artist’s capabilities. 

Dan Higgs’ solo work isn’t for everyone. It isn’t even for most people. It’s intended for a very small audience, and even that select crowd probably doesn’t want to listen to Say God in most situations. I like Higgs and I like Say God, but I certainly don’t feel like listening to it today as I sit in my backyard in the sun. Say God is like a church service from some parallel dimension. Higgs sings modest, rudimentary cosmic hymns between brief bouts of esoteric sermonizing. You don’t listen to it for catchy songs or zoned-out soundscapes. You listen to it almost like a guided meditation. And while it’s hard to pinpoint a time when I want to sit through an hour-and-a-half long whacked-out spiritual ritual, I love that Higgs wanted to tap into the Holy Spirit vibe with this strange recording. It’s like he’s created this whole world and whole belief system, and he’s just revealed a tiny fraction of it in this weird little document of void worship.