Daniel Higgs is deep. He's definitely on another level. Is he a brilliant artist? Maybe, but for most conscious earthbound people who aren't completely at one with the cosmos, the music on
Atomic Yggdrasil Tarot sounds like what it is -- a singular distorted instrument (guitar, toy piano, jew's harp) noodling around spastically into a cheap portable cassette recorder. Sometimes there's a tambourine kicked for a beat or a guttural droning sound in the background, and if you listen carefully, you might hear some birds chirping or wind chimes twinkling in the midst of the tape hiss, but that's the sum of the texture of the recording. At the album's most interesting moments,
Higgs seems to be toying with the tape speed a little, which makes for some interesting and unsettling pitch varieties, and on "Spectral Hues", it's likely that he's pressing the fast-forward button slightly as he plays singular piano keys to make strange inverted burping sounds as the notes take form. For a select few (under the right amount of psychotropic substances, perhaps) the buzzy drones might take on a higher meaning, but for most listeners, the experience will be more irritating than rewarding. But like many of the great conceptual artists (Marcel Duchamp for instance)
Higgs is a master at philosophizing about the artistic merits of his work. In an interview, he explained that once a person is acclimated to hearing a cyclic pattern of notes for a long period, they will start hearing patterns between the patterns as the alpha and omega shifts, creating a unique experience of the sonic phenomenon. This rationalization is thought-provoking and may give his work a deeper significance, and his genuine sincerity makes the concept worth investigating, but it hardly justifies or gives the piece merit. It's likely that he did personally tap into a higher cosmic level while creating this "music," but it doesn't make the sounds transcendental or metaphysical to all who listen. It instead sounds like someone, baked out of their mind, loosely and furiously playing notes in no particular succession as their mood changes. It's entirely possible that the goal of this project was to challenge the listener or provoke a physical reaction, and it accomplishes that, much in the same way that
Lou Reed's
Metal Machine Music does. Maybe after the right cocktail of psychedelic drugs, this album might take you to a higher plane, or even more likely, it might really freak you out -- but it will probably just bother you until you are forced to turn it off. The upside is that the packaging is fantastic, and includes a book full of paintings by
Higgs, accompanied by acronyms he invented (for example: the word "Music" is an abbreviation of: Mighty Undulations Synchronize Into Cosmoses, which may or may not be true, in this particular case.)