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 compositions 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)