Daniel (A.I.U.) Higgs - Ultraterrestrial Harvest Hymns

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Customer reviews
Press release

4...according to our Mike on Wed 21 Dec, 2011.

Of course you know Dan Higgs already from his work as the benevolent Santa-a-like overlord of DC indie rock and crazy cosmic hippie behind Dischord repeato-legends Lungfish. Won't surprise you then that this tape is an epic collection of little snippets on banjo and organ and piano and guitar and the like; sometimes spacious improvisations, sometimes monged out miniature looped clips of weirdness that our clanking, creaking, about-to-die tape player just makes sound even more wibbly and otherworldly. If you're after something experimental and awkward and uncomfortable and meditative and just plain weird, this has got like an hour of it. If you're a fan of Lungfish and want to see what he's done since, this might be a bit too obtuse to be the best starting point compared to his more fully realised solo works but it's an interesting document nonetheless.

"I can see you very clearly from here,” Daniel says between songs on "Ultraterrestrial Harvest Hymns", his voice a whisper under a hoarfrost of tape sound. As a synecdoche, the moment demonstrates the album’s extra-aural qualities, making sound beyond sound, pushing statements beyond artifice. Moon Glyph is honored to present to the listeners Higgs’ latest (MG25), an album of maundering banjo ragas, paeans, carols and canticles. There’s also a didgeridoo at one point. A shambolic drum machine, as well. Throughout runs its creator’s oftentimes overlooked mirth, a reverent and theandric mirth threaded into heirloom melodies and proclamations that sound neither bumptious nor inauthentic, but dutiful and vatic. An hour in length, "Ultraterrestrial Harvest Hymns", was recorded directly to tape in Northern California, Autumn 2010 and “is offered unto The Divine." Ed. of 500. Art by Daniel Higgs

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