[Photo By Shaun Sandor]
New Mexican minimalist composer William Fowler Collins – who released the dark, minimal new album Field Music last October via Aaron Turner’s SIGE Records – has announced a European tour this autumn. Nebulosa (guitarist Joel Fabiansson from Anna von Hausswolff) will support. With a special guest Aaron Turner (Mammifer, Old Man Gloom, Sumac) joining the shows in Halle and Prague performing solo guitar sets. Full dates are below.
STREAM FIELD MUSIC BY WILLIAM FOWLER COLLINS
William Fowler Collins EU tour dates
Sept 26th Varese IT Twiggy
Sept 27th Bologna IT Ikigia Room
Sept 28th Lugano CH Invitation show
Sept 29th Zürich CH UMBO
Sept 30th Mannheil DE Hafenkirche
Oct 1st Metz FR La Chouée
Oct 2nd Kortrijk BE The Pit’s
Oct 3rd Luxembourg LUX Rocas
Oct 4th Wuppertal DE Gallery Grölle
Oct 5th Hall DE Pierre Grasse
Oct 6th Chemnitz DE Odradek
Oct 7th Prague CZ Potrva
Oct 8th Munich DE Kommittee
Oct 9th Verona IT Malacarne
Oct 10th Cornuda IT Tipetca
Oct 11th Udine IT Invitation show
Oct 12th Velenje SLO Klub eMCe Place
Oct 13th Venzia IT Padiglione9 Forte Marghera
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. (adapted text originally provided by Jim Haynes)
“Convulsing with regular upheavals, the rhythms become a slowly developing form of hypnotism. Field Music pulls you in with its unstoppable gravity. Once inside, it’s impossible to get out, to remove oneself, like prey caught up in a spider’s silver web. Looping out of the machine, these sustained drones quiver in their subtle oscillations and their repetitive regurgitations….the drone lurks in a dark and deep tunnel, using the lower bass frequencies as a lair. The rhythm churns in the distance, but it feels so alive, reeking of ancient history and the ever-shifting revolutions of the present.” – FLUID AUDIO
“it has a staggering amount of emotional intensity, discomfort and dense” – WAS IST DAS“….this guitarist-by-trade brings the most sinister depths of heavy music into the digital era, pulling from both the barren Western doomscapes of Hex-era Earth and the icy calm of Brian Eno’s ambient work to craft a sound that makes for the most bleak vision of America’s future. ” – POPMATTERS
“…wonderful, uneasy electroacoustic compositions, vague textures emerging from the silent dark.” – TINY MIX TAPES
“Collins’ name might be familiar from his work for the Type label… ….from the gaseous low-end drones, to terrifying Lynchian death rattle…” – FACT MAGAZINE
“It is almost a shame that the whole Mayan apocalypse thing did not happen, because [Collins’ music] would have made the perfect soundtrack for it. As far as conveying darkness, William Fowler Collins has created a work that rivals Lustmord’s Heresy as a piece of captivating, but sinister audio.” – BRAINWASHED.COM
