Excellent blastery and rubble heck gammoo on Woven Territories (PUBLIC EYESORE PE 154), a gobbet of improv-noise rumble from Bryan Day with Dereck Higgins.
Day we know as the hard-working San Francisco maestro who runs Public Eyesore and causes trouble in the music world wherever he lays his tracks, but the visionary Dereck Higgins is new to us. Seems to be based in Omaha (where today’s exploits were recorded in 2013) and is a veteran bass player active since the days of ‘Kung Fu Fighting’ and Innervisions – described as “independent” which is a nice way of alluding to what are I assume his maverick tendencies. Runs his own label DVH Recordings and has over 200 credits logged on Discogs for instruments, voices, and production, over 100 releases in his own name, and is member of bands you never heard of, such as Digital Sex, InDREAMA, Norman & The Rockwells, RAF, Skuddur, Son, Ambulance, The Door, and David Nance & Mowed Sound. To which we could also add Cleemann, The Jewel Beast, Paddy O’Furniture, and The Pat Higgins Trio.
Like many such luminaries, Dereck Higgins is apparently very much at home with any musical style you care to bring to the session (disco, cajun, blues, punk, jazz and electronic). But today on these Woven Territories – that’s how big carpets are in Nebraska – he shines in the production of non-specific, lumbering, inspired junk noise and peculiar, writhing sounds. The playing is also unblighted by the piecemeal, chop-suey stle of fingerpicking and percussion which sometimes shows up on other releases from Public Eyesore. Mind-bending, surreal, strange, melted, distorto-globs of ice cream dropping from the skies. (01/08/2023)