Years active 2004–present Record label Northern Spy Records | Website Official Site Music group Zs | |
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Labels Northern Spy, NNA Tapes, Telegraph Harp, Words+Dreams, Un-Fun Records Associated acts Zs, Arto Lindsay, Animal, Mivos Quartet Albums Xe, Bachanalia, Social Death Mixtape, String Quartet No. 2 + Glacia, As You Are (Original Motion Picture Score) Genres Experimental music, Avant-garde, Classical music, Noise music, Free improvisation, Film score Similar Zs, Sam Hillmer, Greg Fox, Guardian Alien, Alex Mincek | ||
Patrick Higgins is an American avant-garde composer, guitarist, and producer from New York City, known for his work in experimental and contemporary classical music. He plays guitar and composes in the experimental ensemble Zs, described by The New York Times as "one of the strongest avant-garde bands in New York." His work as composer traverses the styles of the European avant-garde and the tradition of post-minimalist Downtown New York music.
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He has received attention for his unique style of guitar playing and his work as a composer, heralded as "one of the most gifted guitarists working today" (The Quietus) and a "formidable concert music composer" (The Boston Globe). After a performance at South By Southwest music festival in Austin, TX he was named the "best guitarist of the 2013 event" by Premier Guitar Magazine.
Biography
Higgins was born in 1984 in Manhattan and attended high school at the Urban School of San Francisco. He returned to New York City in 2002 to attend Columbia University, earning a B.A. in Philosophy and an M.A. in Comparative Literature.
Higgins co-composed, played guitar, and produced Zs' 2015 record Xe, which is the band's most critically acclaimed record to date. Xe earned an 8.0 from Pitchfork, the highest score yet given to Zs by the prominent music magazine. The Wall Street Journal described the group's performance on 'Xe' as "hypnotic and harsh at once, with an ability to mesmerize while keeping a listener at attention." At the end of 2015, Rolling Stone named Xe number 3 on its list of the Best Avant-Garde Records of the year. The album and artwork for Xe were purchased by the SF MOMA and are part of the museum's permanent collection.
As a composer, he has written numerous works for string quartet, chamber orchestra, and solo instruments. In 2013, a double LP of Higgins' String Quartet No.2 was released on Ex Cathedra Records, along with a work entitled Glacia, an electronic re-composition of the string quartet performance. NNA Tapes released the Social Death Mixtape in the fall of 2015, a record presenting a wide array of Higgins' avant-garde works of Chamber Music and featuring compositions for harpsichord, string ensemble, solo violin, guitar, and electronics. Tiny Mix Tapes gave Social Death Mixtape 4 out of 5 stars, citing the record as a "masterful brand of de-composition". Later that year, Telegraph Harp released Higgins' Bachanalia, an electro-acoustic record of classical guitar performances of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. The record features a series of acoustic guitar performances, each electronically processed and re-amplified in differing ways. Bachanalia was heralded as a "masterpiece" and a virtuoso recording and helped to solidify Higgins' reputation as among the most innovative guitarists of his era. The recording of the album took place in two different churches, one in Brooklyn, New York and one in Hudson, New York, with the quality of space and natural reverb entering in as a feature of the musical performance. The recording "winds up as an outstanding album of classical music that also happens to explore the same ideas and notions regarding space that inspired Alvin Lucier [...]".
In 2016, Higgins composed the score for the feature film As You Are (dir. by Miles Joris-Peyrafitte), which was awarded the prestigious Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
On November 3 and 4, 2016, Pioneer Works presented a multi-media concert and art installation of Higgins' chamber music in Red Hook, Brooklyn entitled TOCSIN: Three New Works by Patrick Higgins. The concert featured Higgins' third string quartet composition SQ3 performed by the Mivos Quartet, as well as the world premiere of TOCSIN performed by virtuoso pianist Vicky Chow and the world premiere of Emptyset [0,0] for chamber orchestra, performed by the Wet Ink Ensemble. The concert featured an immersive sculptural and video art installation which was developed by Higgins in collaboration with the acclaimed visual artist Tauba Auerbach and the architect Alexander Arroyo. For TOCSIN, Auerbach created a series of hanging sculptures that were suspended from the ceiling and placed in front of three large film screens above the stage. From the balcony of the concert hall, projectors were used to map video content developed by Arroyo onto the screens and sculptures surrounding the musicians. The video content was specifically created to react to three pieces of Higgins' music.
Over the course of 2015 and 2016, Higgins joined with legendary No-Wave auteur Arto Lindsay to play guitar and assist in arrangement and production for Lindsay's forthcoming studio record, "Cuidado Madame", recorded in Brooklyn at Strange Weather Studios. The record is forthcoming in 2017.
Higgins also played guitar for Cibo Matto's Miho Hatori, on her forthcoming solo record "Miss Info", recorded in residence at Pioneer Works in the summer of 2016
Studio albums
Partial list of works
Songs
Wolf GovernmentXe · 2015
New SlavesNew Slaves · 2010
XeXe · 2015