As Patrick Higgins rounds into his third decade making explorative experimental music, he is doing anything but resting on his laurels. VERSUS, his recently-released album for Nicolás Jaar’s Other People imprint, is a straight tour de force of both composition and improvisation, with Higgins programming and performing on the guitar, keyboards, synthesizer, and drums. It’s a true headphone album, concerned with sonic space and texture as a means to access sublime states of listening. 

We caught up with Higgins—read the interview and listen to VERSUS below.

VERSUS marks a new direction in your work. How is the record in conversation with earlier releases? 

Patrick Higgins: VERSUS engages and extends many of the musical ideas and tactics on my previous records. In one respect, it is a hybrid record: it is both highly composed and highly improvised. There are tracks in which structures and themes and rhythms are used as a terrain across which to improvise. On others, the improvisations for guitar or synthesizers led to emergent forms which were then later written to, adding and orchestrating the track around what had been concretized in the improvisations. That dialectic is at the core of one of the meanings of “versus” for me. There is a politics suggested in this too. The record is also very much concerned with style, with articulating a new vision of musical style. Vibration, and specifically textural vibration, is variously used to set a tone across all the pieces. I wanted to leverage an aesthetic of vibrating parts, where linear melodic elements and timbral or rhythmic flutters would be in opposition and somehow find a way to cohere into a functional musical machine, or terrain, or plateau. A vibe. A multi-stability. 

To suggest other potential worlds to inhabit. To suggest ways to navigate.

Where and when did you make VERSUS? Can you talk a bit about that process?

 

The record began through a commission from Monom Studios in Berlin, at Funkhaus. I wrote the title track for a surround-sound multi-speaker installation performance there in November 2022. The integration and explosion of multiple musical elements/cells into moving spatialized sound objects set me down the later course for how to make and write the record. To collapse surround-sound into a stereo field, to maintain depth of field in the sound. The record was then produced and recorded in New York over the following year and a half.

Your music often explores the relationship between sound and space. How do you approach the spatial aspects of your music, and how does your upstate studio, Future-Past Studios, play a role in this exploration?

 

I have always been very focused on sound as space. The physical dimension of sound is literally vibration—the way sound waves fill the contours of a space and ricochet, reflect, refract, and collide works like a musical sonar for the listener. It provides an experiential architecture which transforms the physical architecture of a space into something entirely new. This is true both of physical space and phenomenological space, i.e. sound can transmute the perception of the outer and the inner world we occupy. While my music is not scientific in any literal way, I am always looking to use these principles as a way to work more expressively, more emotionally, in my art. I am concerned with the human aspect of this, in other words, less the technical aspect. To make music in a way that allows the listener to feel as though they are occupying a different world—to hear and to feel the musical elements of a piece as though they were in a space with them, where the music itself is forging that space. At its best, this can provide an experience that takes us profoundly outside of ourselves and outside of the contours of our typical perception, potentially allowing for new insight, new empathy, new emotions. I use the studio as a tool for this: a space to explore and to produce new space.

The album features appearances from percussionist Bobby Previte and trumpeter Chris Williams. How did they get involved?

 

I met Chris while performing at Moers Festival in Germany in 2022. I was immediately a fan of his trumpet playing and his sensitivity and skill as an improviser, as well as with the range of his tone on the instrument. We became friends and mutual admirers during that festival. When I invited him to contribute to the new record, I knew he would do something special. He completely transformed the meaning of the piece “Little One” for me. Bobby I met in New York many years ago, he is a long-standing drummer in the jazz and new music scene there. Bobby is a deeply generous musician and a great listener. You can hear it in how he plays the drums, not like many other drummers. He is very attuned to the other instruments and finds great ways to support and elevate the musical situation. He and I recorded these two tracks live in single takes together—a testament to his artistry.

This is your second outing on Nicolás Jaar’s Other People. You also have a project together, AEAEA. Can you tell us about your creative relationship?

Nicolás is a great friend. Our relationship emerged through musical collaboration over a few years between 2015 and 2017. We began to work more closely together through studio production work and eventually performing and composing together for our AEAEA project, which we premiered at Le Guess Who in Holland, 2019. We are currently finishing a new studio record together for that project. Stay tuned.

What music have you been listening to lately? 

During periods of time when I am not writing, I tend to check out as much contemporary music as possible. When I am writing or recording, I tend only to listen to very old music (ancient, medieval, baroque, etc). I like to displace my listening practice against my creative practice — so that I’m not overly inundated with the “new” while trying to create, and vice versa.

What’s next for Patrick Higgins?

 

I will be performing live a lot over the coming year, to present the works from VERSUS in different live situations and spaces. October 29th I will perform the record live at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY. It’s a favorite venue of mine for sure. I also love performing a record after it’s been released, because the run of shows always winds up transforming the music even further. Giving a second and a third life. Beyond performing, I will be finishing the AEAEA record and starting work to write a few new large-scale works for orchestra and strings. Also keeping grateful, peaceful and wishing for peace for everyone else.