Ambition strikes9/18/2023 Like subletting an apartment, they could rearrange the furniture but not radically redecorate.Īlthough he is more concerned with its artwork - digital images of violence in nature that express "this idea of the bucolic but very disturbed" - the double album is a cohesive work in its own right.įiggis appears slow to embrace the tribute, however, pointing to the title, When It's Ajar: The Music Of Daniel Figgis? and stressing the question mark. None of the 40 contributors, from Roger Doyle and Donnacha Costello to Cathal Coughlan and the Warlords of Pez, could incorporate any extraneous material, ensuring a faithful "recomposition" of Figgis's work. When the experimental electronic music label Front End Synthetics approached him with the idea of remixing Skipper, his sublime and understated instrumental album, which has endeared itself to both classical and electronica listeners, Figgis naturally had some conditions. This may seem like aesthetic authoritarianism, but it is typical of Figgis. When he has achieved the order that he wants he will notate the composition and, finally, hand it back for the original performers to play. He will then take the recordings and process the improvised material digitally. Prescribing a tempo and the keys in which they can work, he will allow them to improvise for 30 seconds. "I like collaboration," he says, "but only on my terms." This week, for example, he is bringing the Ottoni Ensemble, a local brass quintet, to Marlay House, in Rathfarnham, where he will establish strict parameters for performing. He describes it as the imposition of structure on musical improvisations but steers clear of conceding any jazz allegiances. The Dublin-born musician, who is Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council's composer-in-residence, has been toying with a germane idea, a compositional approach he calls imposition. " 'Daniel Figgis' MOTOR' has a little fun with the (post) post - industrial revolution's revelation of the natural world's phantasmagoric machine - tyranny's engine rebooted*," it reads. And when his e-mail - our actual interview - materialises, three days and seemingly several drafts later, it will read like a collage of fortune-cookie aphorisms, a proposal for a visual-arts PhD and a very pushy press release. Over the following four days he will call me 14 times and I will consider changing my phone number. So long as I keep my hands where he can see them, refrain from recording him or from jotting down any notes, he will chat for more than an hour about his career, his music, his experiments with power chords and harmoniums and his two forthcoming performance pieces for Kilkenny Arts Festival and Dublin Fringe Festival, which are called Daniel Figgis' Motor and Daniel Figgis' Tamper. It's not that Figgis is reluctant to talk. But it is becoming increasingly clear, even to the patrons of this sleepy, dimly lit Rathfarnham pub, that the incongruous figure with peroxide-blond hair, in a sombre suit and impenetrably dark, deeply ostentatious Karl Lagerfeld sunglasses, is used to getting his way. After all, his publicist couldn't locate him, he will normally be interviewed only by e-mail and he won't say how he got my number. Perhaps the surprise of Figgis's earlier phone call has made it difficult to remember the rules. My pen retreats guiltily from its notebook. 'You're doing it again," chides Daniel Figgis, composer, musician, installation artist, former child actor, recovering rock musician and self-confessed control freak. Peter Crawley hears about the former Virgin Prune's next projects Just to control the people he works with.
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