![]() Expansive and unhurried - “Cocoon on the Cross” and “Hems and Seams” clock in at near the ten minute mark - these tracks build off layered drones to create complex but perplexing meditations. The six tracks range in timbre from feedback-laden loops of sound to Eastern-style slow evolutions of banjo or jew’s harp. The album of accompanying music is dense, incompressible atmosphere. Facing a series of abstract plates that seem full of unrevealed symbol (geometric shapes, womb-like curves), acrostic poems are printed ranging from clever (“Belief Is Blasphemy Lovingly Encoded” for BIBLE) to the oddly beautiful (BELOVED becomes “Beyond Existing Language Our Verses Encircle Deities”). As an artistic statement, the book is no more comprehensible. Sounds ridiculous, right? But given Higgs’s self-stylings as a prophet of the spiritual realm, we shouldn’t judge on this basis alone. ![]() Atomic Yggdrasil Tarot may refer to a new (atomic) way of achieving cosmic connection (yggdrasil) through spirituality (tarot). The yggdrasil is a tree out of Norse mythology that supposedly connects all the worlds in the cosmos together. ![]() As to precisely how the six instrumental compositions are meant to relate to the abstract artwork and acrostic poetry of the art book - let alone to their titles themselves - remains something of a mystery. ![]() You could easily flip over it if you didn’t know it was an essential part of the experience Higgs has created for us. The book, a handsome blue hardcover, has the CD slipped into the front cover. Again, the packaging is exquisite, and justifies the purchase price on the collectible aspect alone. Higgs’s Atomic Yggdrasil Tarot is the second in Thrill Jockey’s limited edition book-CD series, and it’s more of a challenge than Aki Tsuyuko’s childlike electronic compositions and oil painting pairing. Sometimes unraveling vision from hallucination is not so simple for the uninitiated. Despite the fact that he’s undoubtedly accomplished at his chosen instruments, the artist’s material can sound, at times, little more than the improvisations of a hallucinating mind. Most well-known as frontman of post-punk band Lungfish, Higgs has recorded under his own name as well as the moniker Cone of Light. I can’t say I’m a Higgs follower or even much of a Gnostic re: his fiercely cultivated out-there image and famously wild beard, or even the addendum to his name, but the Baltimore-based artist and musician has been making music for twenty years. into his name, standing for Arcus Incus Ululat, in case you were wondering. But now when tattooing is more bigger than ever with more tattoo artists than you can count, it’s not the same as it used to be.Daniel Higgs regularly appends A.I.U. We are part of something bigger they might have thought. It was exiting to see the same images done with slight moderations. The sailors and travellers were the calling cards. Because it used to be – back in the day – unusual to see work from other artists. Now people are doing it because they think it is cool, but they used to do it because it meant something. Stop looking at other tattooers work for influence. Daniel didn’t sit in front of his computer looking at Myspace while hitting refresh to Chad Koeplinger’s page. Why is that? Well, I think if you are a tattoo artist and want to see tattoos by The Higgs, you really shouldn’t. There is that spark in the work he put out. That is the Seed motherfucker’s, The sacred seed. He re-introduced the overlooked path of using black like it was the truth and made his designs simpler, more dynamic and bolder than was accustomed that time (a secret hint: take a look at the Owen Jensen flash in the book Pierced Hearts and True Love if you want images to those words), but most importantly he was one of the few who brought outside influences to tattooing. He took what was before, embraced it and then gave it another birth. In fact he was one of the few people who re-wrote the book. And that is what Daniel also recognized – even if he didn’t completely know what IT really was – and started to expand the vocabulary of tattoo artists. In every tattoo shop that looks like one. It is in all the flash sheets that you see. And you know the path that I am talking about. It was trough Tux that Daniel was introduced to that great lineage of tattooers, most notably perhaps Thom Devita from who Tux also got the aura and path from. Daniel Higgs started tattooing somewhere around 1984 and apprenticed under a person by the name of Tux Farrar.
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