no-wave christmas pt 9: Davitt Sigerson

To catch up on what exactly is going on, read this post first. A summary: Ze Records, 1981, no-wave and mutant disco, christmas.

Davitt Sigerson grew up in New York and London, and read history at Oxford University. He has worked as a songwriter, record producer (Tori Amos, Bangles) and journalist, and as an executive in the music business. He lives in New York with his wife and their two daughters. He is working on his second novel. His first novel is called Faithful. The ninth track on the original Ze holiday compilation was from Davitt Sigerson. Visit a great Ze fansite.

Prior to becoming the president of Polydor Records in 1991, music critic/record producer Davitt Sigerson had an occasional career as a songwriter and singer. Six years after making a lyrically clever but musically bland solo album scorched with his unpleasantly raspy vocals, Sigerson formed a quartet with keyboardist Bob Thiele Jr. (a sideman on Falling in Love Again) and created an arty and idiosyncratic mixture of jazz-and-funk-inflected tunes given a surrealistic spin. Experiments in Terror is a descriptive mind-movie soundtrack with cryptic vocal passages in place of character dialogue. The electronic music and disembodied texts are reminiscent of Will Powers, but the Macadamians stimulate a wider variety of moods, using source material as far-ranging as George Jackson's Soledad Brother prison memoir. A concentration camp and the twisted, oppressive minds that run it - clinically described in the lyrics of "Arbeit Macht Frei" - are echoed in the pounding drums, crunching guitar and distorted solos. Intriguing and provocative. - Trouser Press

9. Davitt Sigerson - It's a Big Country