Every Record I Own - Day 419: Fountainsun Music Today
If I somehow manage to continue this project through the remainder of my music library, I’m going to wind up spending a lot of time talking about Daniel Higgs. I’ve tried to stick to an alphabetical-by-artist / chronological-by-album strategy with these posts, though I’ve made deviations here and there as it seems fit. I was tempted to postpone Fountainsun, or at the very least, to talk about his work with the mystic punk quartet Lungfish before I dove into his more recent artistic ventures, but I suspect that Mr. Higgs would see some folly in that tactic. I’m sure Lungfish is the portal by which most people have been welcomed into the Higgs’ esoteric world, but his illuminations and incantations have been a constant across all of his projects---from Lungfish’s Fugazi-on-a-spiritual-acid-trip to Skull Defekts’ jagged pulsations and cryptic rallying cries to his numerous solo forays into spoken word and outsider music. Higgs has always operated on a different plane, and considering that he warned us 14 years ago that “time is a weapon of time,” it’s probably wise to expunge the notion that his body of work has an entry point dependent on any sort of historical linearity.
Pardon me... it’s hard to talk about Higgs without sorta talking like Higgs. So let’s talk about Fountainsun in the plainest terms possible. The band is a duo---Higgs and Fumie Ishii---and the music on Music Today ebbs and flows between finger-picked banjo, acoustic ballads, abstract sermonizing, textural soundscapes, and ritualistic percussion. The whole thing feels like a church service for some strange pastoral cult. It’s a record that’s vacillates between a simple quiet beauty and that butterflies-in-the-stomach feeling when you’re about to slip into some sort of altered state.
I bought this LP at The Business in Anacortes, WA while SUMAC was recording What One Becomes at The Unknown.
