Patrick Higgins

What does modern classical sound like?

Of course, the term itself is an oxymoron or a paradox. But for those looking to push the malleable boundaries of chamber music, there are many fascinating avenues. For Patrick Higgins, the road is brutal, bewildering and beautiful. Noise, punk and chamber music are all melting sounds in his hands, his guitar and compositions actively plucking away, finding new notes to warp.

The last half of the 2010s had Higgins working on his most wildly ambitious projects. First was Xe in 2015, a behemoth album from long-running New York sonic warlords Zs. Then, the two monuments were released. Under his own name, DOSSIER and TOSCIN were Higgins exploring every facet of his own talent, both as a guitarist and a composer. We chatted with Higgins about his work.

In pop culture and in some music circles, there are clear boundaries between punk and chamber/classical music. You’ve crossed these barriers many times, why do you think certain critics/musicians/listeners cling to these distinctions?   

This is a really interesting question to start off an interview and conversation. 

I think that a lot of these distinctions work, at their best, to help organize musical and artistic traditions from a kind of standpoint after the fact, which can be sometimes helpful. But of late and probably for far too long, these sorts of demarcations of genre and style and scene work more to facilitate a kind of marketing and a kind of criticism that just is marketing, at root.  In other words, criticism in the service of sales...  although this is perhaps cynical. 

It’s also very difficult to get one’s head around a form of music that has not yet been bounded by a “genre” that can help to organize expectations in listening. Much of what I’m interested in is performing outside of those expectations— not in petty revolt, but in simply and truly following a sound, an approach. 

How does it feel to explore and recraft unfinished work from someone like Bach? With “Contrapunctus XIV” was the intent purely musical, or did the wider context of his death also play into how you approached the piece?  

In a way my response to this question followers from the first question. This is a very “classical“ piece of music, and yet at its core is very much without style in a certain respect, this piece is a sort of attempt at “pure” counterpoint and pure exploration of contrapuntal writing. The fact of its incompleteness is profound to me, and fascinating. The piece ends just as the establishing theme of the fugue begins to return, woven in against the developmental themes in the middle. In other words, it’s as though in his attempt to reconcile the beginning with a process of development into some sort of meaningful finale, Bach has short-circuited the whole mechanism, and it cuts into silence. This feels very relevant to me now, to our lives now, despite being centuries old, and perhaps an accident of history. 

Zs' music manages, a lot of the time, to sound old and new simultaneously. With DOSSIER and TOCSIN, did you find yourself listening to more modern artists during the process or primarily exploring, say, Bach and his contemporaries? 

 Yes, I think this sense of the old and the new is exactly what I’m getting at in this, and certainly in my feelings this has a lot to do with the attempt to make music that is direct and without genre. That does not mean that the music is not aware of history or engaged with the present. 

It does mean that this music tends to occupy a position that is not easily located on either side, and this is also why it can be so difficult to pin down the genre, which is much more of a historical marker than anything else. 

 In writing dossier and tocsin, I was very purposely not listening to much contemporary music and really trying not to listen to much music at all. Both of those records were written in very different ways however. Dossier was really developed over a few years of heavy touring and live performance, refining and developing the work in public before it became a finished or stylistically “full” work. I didn’t record it until about two or three years after having begun performing those initial ideas live and using the social context of performance to help advance and focus the musical thought. Tocsin was written on paper, which is not to say that it doesn’t derive from experience, but it is compositional music that I wrote with pen and paper for other musicians, for specific ensembles, that in a way more patiently instances many of my aesthetic and musical ideas. That work as well as dossier actually, engages with history in a meaningful but very radical way— by calling it into question and yet positioning it as something important now and importantly lacking now in a lot of areas of public life, or ethical life, whatever that might mean ha ha.

What do you find the most fun or what sounds are you the most attracted to now? You’ve said you’re interested in what does not yet exist, is that more of a thrill-seeking adventure or a self-imposed challenge?

I  really feel like I want to make the sounds that I want to hear, that I would like to be brought into the world... and that I would like to spend time with once they exist. 

When something feels worth hearing over and over, and feels exciting to be inside of, then it feels worth developing further. It’s just a kind of way to make the music that I want to hear. I think in a way a lot of artists operate like this: the goal is more to usher in sounds that we want to live with, and to offer them to the world as things to live with.

You’ve, so far, done three film scores. What drew you to those in the first place and what would draw you to scoring another film in the future?

Film work is really difficult and really fascinating as a musician, it is very humbling, and requires a kind of humility that is sometimes not so present in making ones own music. Ultimately the music written for film is there to support somebody else’s artwork. It’s kind of a beautiful thing to bring your own visions and expertise to bear on somebody else’s project in a support capacity, still trying to find ways to be innovative and surprising, but not stepping on toes or letting your own shit get in the way of the larger work.

In a previous interview, you’d mentioned you’ve made a software that allows you to trigger samples through your guitar. Has that software/guitar interface evolved over the last few years? 

I’ve used the computer to interconnect guitar with various ways of triggering samples in real time, so that they are “mapped“ onto the notes I can play on the guitar. It’s helped the electronic side of my solo work to have a much more fluid and less rigid or quantized feel to it.  Beyond that, I’m not particularly interested in tech itself, more in developing language inside of that which I could not do without it. And that continues to puzzle and excite me in lovely ways. 

The world of classical music can be hard to enter. High ticket prices, reverence toward the canon without bringing in new artists and issues with racism and misogyny can make it difficult to get people interested and working with that music. Are there ways for classical music and the structure around it to evolve to be more inviting?  

Absolutely yes! I think that this has been happening more and more over the last few years in really nice ways. New performers and soloists and ensembles and composers are increasingly pushing beyond the pre-established structures in which this kind of music is made and presented. And ultimately the historical dimension of so-called classical music also bears this out: the composers and visionary performers of the past in their own day struggled deeply, against prejudice and misunderstanding and technical insufficient and social isolation.

 I think we have now an opportunity for new music to be composed and performed quickly and anywhere by people who are not pretentious and who are exceptionally talented, in a way this is all it takes. Performing and presenting new works of classical or concert music in surprising venues and situations where The social hang is also fun and inviting and spirited helps a lot. Like not turning on the lights at 9 PM and kicking everyone out (!!). 

You’ve said you’re “generating and pushing back” against electronic processes. Do you see computers as an instrument into themselves, or a tool for manipulation? 

I  absolutely see computers as both instruments in themselves and tools for manipulation. 

The computers in themselves are not interesting to me.

 Automated processes are only intellectually interesting, they are not artistically interesting to me, because they lack the necessary ethical and romantic experience to have their decisions mean much of anything.

With contemporaries like Battles, Xiu Xiu, Oxbow, and Kayo Dot, do you see yourselves as part of any sort of movement or "clique" of artists, or does Zs exist as its own project and entity, removed from other music made contemporaneously?

Zs absolutely exists and has existed in a particular era and scene of underground New York City music and art, and in the last few years a more broadly international one. However I always feel like we have been ourselves more focused on making what we want to hear and ushering in experiences that we would like people to have and that commitment has led us to surprising communities of practice and surprising groups of inspiring peers

Zs' music, especially that on Xe, seems influenced by many things, many media, besides music. In the Bandcamp liner notes for Xe, there's even an anecdote about visual artist Tauba Auerbach, who contributed to that album's cover art. How does art, particularly non-music art, influence Zs?

The various arenas of influence that go into composing a piece of music for Zs are much wider than only music. We don’t really explicitly look to any one arena , but all aspects of our interests and experiences become a kind of material that we discuss and work to translate into new musical languages. This is certainly very similar to how a lot of visual or literary artists work as well I’m sure, and those we’ve collaborated with successfully I know feel the same way. It’s all ultimately kind of about style and process, about having a style and having a process. Whatever material gets put through that then it is up for grabs.

File Under: Interviews