Highly recommended. Double vinyl housed in deluxe packaging, including stiff printed plastic sleeve. Tense. Listening to this record causes all kinds of tension in your mind and body. It's quite amazing. Patrick Higgins’ album TOCSIN is full of thrilling opposites: A modern classical record with a punk/noise ethos, from a composer who has lived and breathed both identities. A masterclass of visceral genre-bending sounds, that are physical and delicate at the same time. Over the course of three large compositions, the listener is brought on a journey of constant surprise: as when the sound of violins dissolves into a halo of pure noise, more at home in an underground electronics show than anything that appears on a concert stage. Patrick Higgins is known in a few different worlds: as guitarist for the post-everything band Zs, as a solo performer of hypnotic/pyrotechnic electric guitar music. The performers include the Wet Ink Ensemble, acclaimed pianist Vicky Chow, and the Mivos Quartet, “one of America’s most daring and ferocious new-music ensembles.”
