Nicholas Collins' Semi Conducting: Rambles Through the Post-Cagean Thicket
Margasak: " [an] excellent new memoir/experimental music study"
Beginning on January 1, 2016 Collins began a daily writing exercise, typing out a story, anecdote, thought or rumination every morning. Eventually his wife Susan Tallman, an accomplished art historian, writer, and editor, told him she thought he had the makings of a book, so Collins set about whipping more than 1000 little documents into the new volume. The composer, musician, improviser, educator, writer, and arts administrator has created a dynamic two-laned story that explains his own creative trajectory, illustrated by the people and histories that impacted him, with compelling little stories about and interactions with the likes of Lucier, John Cage, Ron Kuivila, Michel Waisvisz, and David Behrman, and how he sees them telling the story of experimental music. He gamely chronicles his successes and failures over the decades. recounting his experiences as a student as well as an administrator and curator at influential institutions like Amsterdam’s STEIM and New York’s the Kitchen, and a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Early on he mentions how many of his early works “seemed to spring from sentences that began, ‘What would happen if…?’” Collins established himself as a deeply curious, inveterate tinkerer obsessed with understanding how electronics worked and how he might disrupt those systems to create beguiling sound works.
"Collins possesses an uncanny knack for breaking down his ideas with unusual clarity"
