The guitarist and composer Patrick Higgins, who is probably best known for his work as a member of the Brooklyn avant-garde band Zs, continues to fuse an inveterate punk ethos with restrained contemporary classicism, skirting the borders of free jazz and chamber music, unfolding a dark brand of minimalist techno and dwelling beneath sheathes of industrial noise. His new album Versus abounds in strange machinations, shaky metallurgies and liminal pulses, from the murky liturgical airs which open ‘Antinome’ and take an elevator to the overground, in a verdant clearing relaying a kind of fractured trip hop as though aliens with their long spindly fingers are tentatively learning the rudiments of the form.
With the versatile percussionist Bobby Previte – who has played with everyone from the Beat father and cut-up artist William S. Burroughs and the ramshackle bluesman Tom Waits to the downtown improvisers Elliott Sharp, John Zorn and Wayne Horvitz while establishing an enduring partnership with the soprano saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom – the twanging ‘Sirocco’ plays out like a series of movements, beginning somewhere between the desert rock of the Sahel and a spaghetti Western before easing towards the angular forms of post rock or math rock bastions like Shellac and Gastr del Sol. The piece even flirts with the primitive guitar of Robbie Basho and John Fahey with a few flamenco or bolero flourishes in its percussive rhythms and the echoes of castanets, eking as though effortlessly towards popular music with a late section redolent of The Cure and the extended coda to ‘Pictures of You’.
From the leaning and disorientating stabs of ‘Faceless (pulse)’, the expansively titled ‘The Outside Doesn’t Dream of Itself’ embodies a fraying Americana which through a process of machine learning begins to artificially regenerate in a way both insular and portentous, sometimes garbled and slow-moving then sounding by the end of the track like the thrashing of a mechanical snake which eventually gorges on itself. The aching trumpet of Chris Williams emerges through the staticky chimes of ‘Little One’, and scabrous barrages of noise define the rhetorical space of ‘Aporia’, the album’s closing track.
But it’s the title piece and record opener ‘Versus’ which receives the most attention, where Higgins who performs on guitar and keyboards, synthesizers, drums and by laptop programming over the course of the album layers a roiling and shifting wave pattern with fabricated blips and beeps. Drumrolls so keenly rendered that you can hear every movement of the sticks detach from the arms of the drummer, moving nimbly mid-air, soon giving way to synthetic oscillations on a track which calls to mind the 20 Jazz Funk Greats of Throbbing Gristle and the dub master Moritz von Oswald from his early days as one half of Basic Channel to the choral abstractions of last year’s standout Silencio. Guiding the direction of his album, which has been years in the making, Patrick Higgins premiered ‘Versus’ at the spatial venue MONOM in Berlin, where he devised a configuration for seventy-five surround sound speakers.
