“…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
The New Mexican composer William Fowler Collins presents his new album of dark minimalism and primal rhythms, Field Music is officially out today via SIGE Records and streaming below.
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)
Fans of Eliane Radigue, Christophe Heemann, and Demdike Stare especiallly would be well served to investigate Field Music.
Track list:
1. We Are Here To Help You
2. Field Music
3. Contact Is A Mother
4. How Horrible It Would Be
3. Contact Is A Mother
4. How Horrible It Would Be
5. They Wept Together
“a dark and minimal dream sequence from New Mexico, where slow, mystical drones are embedded into the fabric of rhythmic diversity, pulled together by dark, mysterious intentions.” – FLUID RADIO
“….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
“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