Daniel Figgis

“… a hint of the wild and frightening… spectacular. The title track… doesn’t so much proceed as stampede… like the soundtrack to some deranged Bacchanalian rite… Beautifully rich, exquisite and individualistic, this Pool is definitely worth diving into.”
werk.re

“… as epic and atmospheric as ever… demonstrating the intricacy and precision of his work… beautifully crafted… we are immediately immersed into a teeming pool of typists, transported… AWOL stretches and cracks… AUDITORIUM splashes into life, a beautifully curated meshing of field recordings… crashing and immersing in this hypnotic wave, submerged in subterranean, creaking woozily as sound spheres float to the surface… hurty pulses, is more organic… a deeper rich vibration, for a flickering moment. Glimmered delivers us safely back to the typing pool… in this spliced-up montage of a flickering light book, wooshing moments and a beating heart, growls expanding… immersing the listener right at the centre of this magnificent amphitheatre of sounds. Ultra-vivid and obsessive… brings to life the complexity of being human, navigating the confusing world of emotion and relationships… ever shifting sound structures… hypnotic. Music plucked out of everyday life experiences, contemporary sound design for the ears.”
Sam Chamberlaine – godisinthetvzine

“5 golden tracks…
Daniel Figgis is an artist that constantly thinks outside the box when creating innovative music… rebellious and destined to leave you picking your jaw up off the floor… (this) isn’t for the faint-hearted… the glitch filled soundscape constantly evolving… get lost in Daniel’s music – it’s truly remarkable.”
Chloe Mogg – moggblog.com

“… a man whom I regard as the genius product of Dublin’s many arcane and dream-like histories, from the city’s theatre/literary-only days, through art-rock & punk’s introduction of owner-operator music, and into the ferment of what happened since…”
Cathal Coughlan

Buy Limited Edition Cassette – SOLD OUT

“Having spent well over a decade concentrating on staging big conceptual performance pieces, Daniel Figgis has mysteriously and suddenly started dropping little trails of previously unheard material, some completely brand new and some apparently liberated without warning from the vaults. His appeal lies in the way he blurs boundaries between the organic and the synthetic, the traditional and the experimental.

Opening track ‘PHOTO-FINISH (with shortcuts)’ harks back to the lushly liquid melodic ooze of his mid-90s Rough Trade classic ‘Skipper’, while ‘please be me’ sounds more like a surreal modern classical fanfare, with added woozy… the title track a sound bed of suspended, tense ambience. We’ve certainly missed his maverick sonics…”
JunoDaily

Buy Limited Edition Cassette – SOLD OUT

“…loving it… its joyful mood and earworm melody makes it sound like an outtake from (his) masterpiece Skipper. Similar to his recent ‘engine detail’, guitars of all varieties are central to the sound but… viola also makes a crucial appearance. The track has an ancient but timeless quality to it and only leaves me wanting more.

I like the idea of the track being made available on a shellac disc, it gives it an instant patina of age, makes it very collectable and goes against the grain of music being just a digital file. The shellac sound reminds me of a more extreme version of the layers of vinyl crackle found on music by The Caretaker but of course Daniel Figgis has mined this sound before in the mid 1980s.

Do you need a gramophone to play it I don’t know but you can see a video of just this happening. Recommended and more please.”

Abstract Analogue

‘Messiaen meets Metallica in a sublime swirl of sound. Guitar band sonorities bend into orchestral shapes in these uncanny, transporting digressions’
Kevin Brew, RTÉ Sound Stories

‘Glorious’
Dublin Digital Radio

‘Epic’
Daily Star

‘tense… intricate… leaves you wanting more’
Abstract Analogue

engine detail – third digression (Figgis)

Gerry Leonard: Electric Guitar, Classical Guitar, Ebow, Banjo, Drone Bass, Harmonium, Sonic Textures.

Produced by Daniel Figgis and Gerry Leonard.

Recorded, mixed, and mastered by Gerry Leonard at Kyserike Station, New York, 2020.
Additional mixing by Paddy Hunt, Kettle Watch Remote, London, 2020.

Original painting “Daniel’s Clearing (detail)” by Donald Teskey.

© Daniel Figgis, 2020. ℗ Daniel Figgis, 2020.

Self Isolating Congregation

As the effects of the Covid 19 epidemic started to spread, leading eventually to an unprecedented global lockdown, Linear Obsessional asked musicians to send us up to three and a half minutes of them playing solo in isolation. When an extraordinary 85 tracks came in (and was released as >>>>Self Isolating Compilation<<<<, it was clear that the result was not only a testament to isolated creativity, but also an extraordinary resource. 85 pieces of music, building bricks, begging to be reassembled into new works.

Having assembled a cast of remixers I set about allocating 4 tracks each, using a random number generator to ensure no bias in the selections. Only one person (Peter Nagle) ended up getting themselves.

This album consists of twenty quartets and one trio.

The remixers have worked magic, pulling together disparate strands in startlingly original ways. All the original artists are represented and audible here, although sometimes you might have to listen hard for ghostly fragments!
Thanks to everybody who took part in this experiment…

Released May 1, 2020

Tracks allocated and compilation produced by Richard Sanderson for Linear Obsessional April 2020

The cover design is by Paula Garcia Stone

All the source music comes from >>>>>>Self Isolating Compilation<<<<<<

Self Isolating Compilation

Musicians, sound makers and artists isolated and creating. Solo sound works all recorded at home.

Volume 2 will bring the artists together.

I started coming up with the idea for the >>>>Self Isolating Compilation<<<<< just before the full lockdowns started – we were all being told it would be a good idea to stay at home, but the Governmental edicts hadn’t started. By the time the last tracks came in we are all forced to stay in, and find new ways of working.

For musicians this enforced isolation seems especially cruel, as music is, possibly above all, a social activity that explores not just the interaction between musicians, but also between musicians and an audience.
Even if I avoid the cliche of the falling tree in an empty forest, the idea of making music in a void seems strange.

These 85 (Eighty Five!) tracks are an attempted answer to the conundrum, all recorded in isolation at home, and almost all solo (the exceptions being three improvising musicians who share a house, and a father and son duo) throughout the world. There are tracks from UK, USA, France, Spain, Finland, Sweden, Ireland and the Canary Islands. The result is a kaleidoscope…

Released April 2, 2020

>>>>>Self Isolating Compilation<<<<< was put together by Richard Sanderson for Linear Obsessional. March/April 2020

The cover art is by Joanna McCormick
Dedicated to the memory of Kassia Flux.

An audio-visually supported ‘interrogation’ into the spectacular forty-year career of composer, producer, curator and intermedia artist Daniel Figgis by fellow artist Michael Boran with an eye to what happens next for Daniel, incorporating archive recordings, followed by audience Q&A.

“Daniel is a creative engine always pushing the boundaries of the field he engages in, drawing from all of the arts and harnessing it to his advantage.”
– Gerry Leonard, Musical Director, David Bowie

“Daniel Figgis was making post-classical/post-rock music years before either of those terms gained currency.”
– John Schaefer, WNYC: NEW SOUNDS

Image: Daniel Figgis at THE BATTLE oF SPEEDS (2011).
Photo by and © Barney

Ben Wilmott interviews Daniel Figgis in Issue 41 of Electronic Sound magazine. Daniel discusses his career to date and his involvement in Heresy Record’s latest release A Map of the Kingdom of Ireland.

“Echoing the interests of Heresy’s founder… Eric Fraad, many of the contributors here are active across disciplinary borders… Nevertheless, Fraad is a tour guide with an agenda, and on his map most roads lead to Daniel Figgis… credited as composer, musician or producer on seven of these tracks…”

“…Timothy Cream’s Crown of Wines, with Vincent Doherty, (is) an 11 minute dream-waltz that brushes listeners’ faces with feathery mellotron, flute and owl hoots before spiriting their subconscious into more absurdist realms of lurching chords and half-heard speech.”

“…2003’s Avant Garde Your Grille sees Deep Burial’s George Brennan and Richard Howard rework Figgis’s recordings… all jutting edges and cloudy, churning surfaces.”

A Map of the Kingdom of Ireland is Heresy Records’ sequel to the album On the Nature of Electricity & Acoustics curated by Daniel Figgis and released in 2013 to international critical acclaim.

Both albums are currently available from the Heresy shop as a CD bundle.

John Schaefer catches up with Daniel on New York Public Radio’s New Sounds to discuss, amongst other things, his involvement in Heresy Records’ latest compilation of Irish electro-acoustic music A Map of the Kingdom of Ireland.

The show features several tracks from the new compilation alongside some previously unheard material, including sound installation, a Skipper outtake Angel In The House, and On C from the upcoming solo album.

“Daniel Figgis was making post-classical/post-rock music years before either of those terms gained currency; his work continues to be a singular blend of the experimental and the engaging – purposeful, idea-driven, but always direct in its communicative ability.” – John Schaefer

LISTEN TO NEW SOUNDS #4092