Danielson
Snap Outtavit
The most apt description of Daniel Smith's sojourn as a musician would be written in iambic pentameter, because this sojourn is as immemorial as 'The Pilgrim's Progress', or 'Paradise Regained', the son raised in a proper spiritual and musical household, who casts it all off, goes out and listens to a bunch of Syd Barrett and Don Van Vliet and similarly admirable material, is recast in the image of this highly original music, and who then returns to the fold, like in the parables. Nearer to the home fires, he is repurposed and begins to hear the profundity in the familial gospel sound, whereupon he conceives of this band, to be made up of his siblings and friends, which will reproduce this very sound of family, and his band records several albums of truly unique contemporary music, more punk than punk, more psychedelic than psychedelia, and more ecstatic and divinely inspired than a lot of the slick gospel music; he thus falls somewhere between the cracks, like a lot of truly revolutionary American composers, like Charles Ives, like Moondog, like Harry Partch, like Meredith Monk, like Sun Ra. From this singular perch, Smith composes some of the most original music of the nineties and oughts, with his siblings by his side, often wearing inventive homemade costumes spun from the metaphors of the Daniel Smith cosmogony.