ROULETTE: PATRICK HIGGINS & YARN/WIRE

BROOKLYN, ny

January 16, 2025 8:00PM

A two part program: Patrick Higgins will present his most recent album Versus, released on Other People in 2024. Acclaimed new music ensemble Yarn/Wire will also present the NY premiere of Higgins’s work “Three Lines of Flight.”

Versus marks a new direction and development of Higgins’s acclaimed work as a guitarist and composer, drawing on electronic music, free improvisation, and avant-garde modern composition, Versus is a highly emotional and expressive work that pushes Higgins’s own instrumental virtuosity into new territories. He performs guitar, keyboards, synthesizer, drums and laptop programming across a 9-track record that traverses and transforms many aspects of his earlier work. The title track “Versus” was premiered at Monom Studios in Berlin, in a configuration for 75 surround-sound speakers. Combining composed and written elements with highly-focused lyrical improvisations, VERSUS shows Higgins at his best — bridging styles and innovating new music that is harsh while seductive, intense while inviting, and always unexpected.

“Three Lines of Flight” engages a new music in a position of constant threshold — a music forever in-between states of becoming, fleeing from itself, tracing the world of its wake against the world it escapes. The unique instrumentation of double piano and double percussion frames a particular vision of symmetry in this work — a symmetry which will be consistently questioned, exploited, undermined, exaggerated and liberated throughout the performance. The use of complex counterpoint, stubborn unison, solo, duet, trio, and quartet arrangement, as well as electronic interference, push the territory of the traditional ensemble to a fragile and ultimately elastic point of transformation: suggesting other instruments, other modes of being and hearing altogether —towards ecstatic new planes of connectivity. This work is written in three movements, each in its way is situated within a small moment of crisis. Sprung from a particular trap — the question of freedom is posed anew each time. Each movement of the work is an attempt to trace, to articulate, or perhaps to stimulate a way out: a line of escape, a path through the labyrinth. Invention within aporia. Between moments of confinement or definition, a fragile infinitesimal escape: a transition between regimes, a flicker, a brief vibration, the hint or taste or scent of a new path — a potential connection to a new outside.

PROGRAM:

Patrick Higgins - Three Lines of Flight

Patrick Higgins - Versus