WILLIAM FOWLER COLLINS

Booking Agent : Giorgio Salmoiraghi

Originally from rural New England and now living in New Mexico, William Fowler Collins (b. 1974) is a composer, recording artist, and performer of dark minimalist music and drone music. He records and performs in both solo and group contexts.

Collins has released music on the SIGE, Type, Blackest Rainbow, Handmade Birds, Daymare, Sicksicksick, and Root Strata record labels. Current activity includes recording and live performance. Additionally, he is cofounder of several projects including Thalassa with Aaron Bradford Turner (SUMAC, Old Man Gloom, ex-Isis), Mesa Ritual with Raven Chacon as well as a duo with James Jackson Toth (Wooden Wand). He has also recorded and performed with drummer/percussionist Marshall Trammell (Music Research Strategies). Recently he cofounded a new group, Summer of Seventeen, alongside Aaron Turner, Faith Coloccia (Mamiffer and Mára), Monika Khot (Nordra), and Daniel Menche. He has also collaborated and performed with artist Claudia X. Valdes and he has worked with filmmaker Blackhorse Lowe. Collins has performed nationally and internationally, in both solo and group contexts, at festivals and venues including KINDL Berlin, Café OTO (London), the Decibel Festival (Seattle), the On Land festival (San Francisco), the Courtisane Festival (Belgium), Netwerk (Belgium), The University of New Mexico John Donald Robb Composers’ Symposium, The Ende Tymes Festival (NYC), Park Church Co-op (Brooklyn), The San Francisco Art Institute, and many more. He has toured with a diverse range of artists including SUMAC, Jaye Jayle, Jon Mueller, Mamiffer, Daniel Menche, Nordra, Brightblack Morning Light, and Old Man Gloom.
In 2004 Collins graduated from Mills College with an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media.

Last Collins’ album “Field Music” evolves Collins’ slow drone compostions through guitar and electronics, grounding itself upon sustained tones that churn through controlled oscillations activating a trance-state in the listener. Out of this, Collins introduces hypnotic machine-looped convulsions and almost EVP-like disembodied voices on “Contact Is A Mother” as well as polyrhythms that ripple across the title track. He pushes a motorik thump to the foreground of “They Wept Together” to the glowing dilation of foreboding ambience, running parallel to the restrictive strategies of Wolfgang Voigt. The subtle complexities of Field Music address the primal nature of rhythm in connection with the body and the building blocks of energy, matter, and consciousness.
The idea of ‘field music’ can relate to the archaic use of military drum corps in battle, whose patter Collins has intermingled with the polyrhythms associated with Voodoo ritual. To Collins the ‘field’ can also be defined as the physical self (as gleaned from his secular readings of the Bhagavad Gita). The ‘field’ as the fabric of time and space also becomes a possibility when Collins literally wraps this album in the history of the atomic bomb, as the cover photo (see below) portrays the humble ranch where the first nuclear weapon was assembled.

Fans of Eliane Radigue, Christophe Heemann, and Demdike Stare especially would be well served to investigate Collins’ music and performances. 

 
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Tourdates

No shows booked at the moment.