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
