Biography
Emerging from the Baltimore and D.C. hardcore punk milieu of the early 1980s, the heavily bearded and tattooed Daniel Higgs quickly attained underground-icon status bordering on the mythological. He first honed his craft as the wild-eyed frontman of the storied Baltimore hardcore outfit Reptile House, whose fusion of dark psychedelic textures with the era’s raw energy and visual style built a devoted audience and an enduring legend fueled by onstage excess. The group dissolved in 1986, after which Higgs—steeped from youth in the works of Yeats and Dylan Thomas—joined the Apathy Press poets and began delivering poems at open mics. An introduction to ex-Null Set bassist John Chriest, who supplied tape loops to accompany Higgs’s spoken-word pieces, led one evening to an impromptu jam; the instant rapport prompted them to recruit a drummer and guitarist, and the quartet rapidly coalesced into a new ensemble.
Fronting the quintessential band Lungfish, Higgs projected a stage persona that merged Jim Morrison’s stream-of-consciousness verse with G.G. Allin’s unrestrained chaos. His lyrics summoned the ghosts of Franz Kafka and Walt Whitman while his physical antics—eyes rolled back in apparent madness, attempts to extract his own tongue, forehead stabbed with a safety pin amid tirades concerning the Antichrist—struck some viewers as incoherent and others as an unadulterated artistic statement. Following ten Dischord releases he turned to conceptual art, launched the sibling project Cone of Light, and issued multiple volumes of poetry. His debut solo record, cut in 2006 and issued on Holy Mountain, merged spare meditative hillbilly blues with Eastern mysticism and verses addressing corporeal and spiritual ruin inflicted by demons. The sumptuously presented Atomic Yggdasil Tarot appeared on Thrill Jockey in June 2007, pairing a book of his artwork and poems with a CD of abstract lo-fi instrumental drones meant to generate a tarot-like effect when experienced together. In 2010 the two-volume set Say God: Songs & Poems of Daniel Higgs collected his lunatic sermon poems, and a 2013 Latitudes session yielded the twenty-three-minute banjo-and-organ meditation “The Godward Way.”
Fronting the quintessential band Lungfish, Higgs projected a stage persona that merged Jim Morrison’s stream-of-consciousness verse with G.G. Allin’s unrestrained chaos. His lyrics summoned the ghosts of Franz Kafka and Walt Whitman while his physical antics—eyes rolled back in apparent madness, attempts to extract his own tongue, forehead stabbed with a safety pin amid tirades concerning the Antichrist—struck some viewers as incoherent and others as an unadulterated artistic statement. Following ten Dischord releases he turned to conceptual art, launched the sibling project Cone of Light, and issued multiple volumes of poetry. His debut solo record, cut in 2006 and issued on Holy Mountain, merged spare meditative hillbilly blues with Eastern mysticism and verses addressing corporeal and spiritual ruin inflicted by demons. The sumptuously presented Atomic Yggdasil Tarot appeared on Thrill Jockey in June 2007, pairing a book of his artwork and poems with a CD of abstract lo-fi instrumental drones meant to generate a tarot-like effect when experienced together. In 2010 the two-volume set Say God: Songs & Poems of Daniel Higgs collected his lunatic sermon poems, and a 2013 Latitudes session yielded the twenty-three-minute banjo-and-organ meditation “The Godward Way.”
Albums
