Daniel Figgis

New release coming soon.

Under the Island: Experimental Music in Ireland 1960 – 1994 by Nyahh Records.

TWINKLETOE’S Very Necessary Dance…

“… 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<<<<<<