Nicolas Collins Reflects on a Life of Tinkering and Wondering

At a memorial concert devoted to his early mentor Alvin Lucier at St. Elisabeth-Kirche in May of 2022 Nicolas Collins performed “Bird and Person Dyning”, a typically elegant and conceptually transparent 1975 psychoacoustic experiment written by the late composer. It’s a wild, untamed piece in which the performer grapples with feedback produced by a collision of a recording of a chirping bird and feedback produced by a binaural microphone and a stereo set-up. Collins gamely walked the length of the aisle separating two clusters of seats, wielding a very long microphone cable, persistently trying to harness the perfect balance of noise. It’s the kind of unpredictable experiment that Collins adores, and a subject of repeated consideration in his excellent new memoir/experimental music study Semi-Conducting: Rambles Through the Post-Cagean Thicket (Bloomsbury), which creates a different sort of feedback through the collision of his own personal history and that of late 20^th century experimental music.

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.

I first heard Collins through his 1989 album 100 of the World’s Most Beautiful Melodies, where I encountered his “trombone-propelled electronics,” a self-designed early sampling device which used the mechanisms of the brass instrument to both add a performative element to his sample-based improvisations with leading figures of New York’s downtown scene (including John Zorn, Tom Cora, Zeena Parkins, Christian Marclay, Peter Cusack, and Anthony Coleman), but to also help trigger various commands of his electronic set-up. Collins was also the first musician I ever heard make use of CD glitches—I wasn’t aware of Yasunao Tone’s pioneering work at the time—which opened up an entire genre of ambient music thanks to the subsequently work of Berlin artist Oval’s Markus Popp, who would eventually collaborate with Collins on a few projects. In the late 1980s Collins seemed like a beguiling outlier of New York’s downtown scene, working inside of it, but with a practice that was much larger—something his delightful book explains with wit and style.

Collins possesses an uncanny knack for breaking down his ideas with unusual clarity and during his years in Chicago he collected a lot of his thoughts in a book that has spread his ideas and influence widely: Handmade Electronic Music: the Art of Hardware Hacking, which shared many of his peculiar innovations. Detailing his career would require a book, so let’s be grateful that Collins has delivered it. He will celebrate the publication with a performance at KM28 on Saturday, May 3, sharing the bill with veteran experimentalist Bob Ostertag. Rather than reading from his new book, Collins will perform a variety of works spanning his career including “Still Lives,” a 1993 work written as a memorial to his close friend and colleague Stuart Marshall that features the trumpet playing of Ben Neill. You can hear it below, but a motherlode of his music can be heard on this online complement to the book.

“Still Lives,” recorded at Concert Hall at BBC Broadcast House, London 1993 for Radio 3

Jeb Bishop Hornin’ In Berlin

In 2012 trombonist Jeb Bishop left Chicago, a tough loss for the city’s vibrant jazz and improvised music community. An admirably versatile, deeply thoughtful player, over nearly two decades he’d been a part of many important groups, including the Vandermark 5, Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet, School Days, Flying Luttenbachers, the Engines, and Ted Sirota’s Rebel Souls, to say nothing of several excellent groups under his own leadership. He could swing, imbuing his lines with a cool melodic grace, but he also excelled in more abstract, freely improvised settings. A decade later he and his wife Jaki Cellini returned to Chicago and while he’s not quite as ubiquitous around town as he was 25 years ago, he's slipped right back into the action. Not long after I moved to Berlin in 2019 Bishop rolled through town, performing in several contexts including that infamous instrumental grouping, the trombone trio, with two German masters, Matthias Müller and Matthias Muche. During that European tour the group’s performances at the Summer Bummer Festival in Antwerp and the club Jazzkeller 69 in Berlin—where I caught them—were recorded, eventually seeing release in 2022 as From A to B (Jazzwerkstatt).

Now, six years after that last tour, the trio is back, playing Berlin on Tuesday, April 29 at Richten25, sharing the bill with the duo of Kaffe Matthews and Han-earl Park. As heard on that 2022 album the trio achieves a striking fluidity and structural unity rather rare in fully improvised playing, although, on the other hand, few people know the possibilities and proclivities of a trombone player better than another trombonist. All three brassmen possess prodigious technique but their shared respect for melody helps them maintain a rigorous balance, as masses of full-bodied, gliding shapes unfold both in chattery interplay or shifting foundations to support and prod the compatriot that slots into occupy the foreground. The dense interplay toggles between tuneful counterpoint and well-deployed extended technique, as on “A1,” which you can check out below. Here the machine-like unpitched breaths toward the beginning of the piece play out against the two others who engage in terse, rapidly evolving repartee, until those solo unpitched splatters turn tonal and metallic, pushing the trio momentarily toward loud, garrulous chaos, until two of the horns drop out and the third unleashes a subtly morphing stream of muted, abstract motivic development. And there’s still another seven minutes to go! That sort of endless variation is par for the course.

Bishop’s ability to glide from textural exploration to elegant melody in the blink of an eye is served up from outset of “Jounce,” the opening track on the eponymous debut of the trombonist’s Centrifugal Trio, recorded during that same 2019 European visit and released a year later by Astral Spirits. As the adroit rhythm section of bassist Antonio Borghini and drummer Michael Griener kick in the blubbery, relatively shapeless brassy stagger suddenly straightens out, aligning with a sleek swing into a freely improvised post-bop gem, before it slips back, a gradual shift in timbre and tone, briefly pulse-free, only to accelerate into a stabbing thrum driven by a staccato bass tone. You can listen to it below. The trio proves a simpatico match, with all three musicians steeped in jazz fundamentals but all driven by a sense of exploration—structurally, color-wise, rhythmically, and in terms of quicksilver reciprocity. Those mutual sensibilities allow the trio to gallop forward with measured propulsion—albeit a sense of motion that affords creative stutters, noise, and spontaneous mid-stream jousts—while maintaining a commanding grip on proportion, logic, and tunefulness. On this long overdue reunion the trio will become to the Centrifugal Quartet with the participation of alto saxophonist Mia Dyberg, a welcome addition who promises to expand all of that good stuff by at least 25%, or even exponentially more if things really click. The new ensemble hits at the Panda Theater on Wednesday, April 30.

The Instinctive Magic of Eliana Glass

Eliana Glass doesn’t really sing songs as much as she inhabits them, her voice functioning like sonar as it sizes up a tune almost as if it was a room. It’s not an approach I’d expect on a debut recording from a singer who embraces a kind of melodic freedom demonstrated by jazz vocalists, but as she explained in a recent Tone Glow interview:

Singing teachers would say, ‘You need to know the song the way the composer wrote it.’ And it’s why I couldn’t listen to Sarah Vaughan either (laughter). Nina Simone represented this freedom, of something you could only get to at the end.

Glass is still in her late 20s, but she’s found that freedom already, stretching, reshaping, and inventing melodic shapes with an authority and fearlessness that most singers never manage in a lifetime. I’m not proposing that the performances on her debut album E (Shelter Press) represent an end point or that she’s established herself as a master yet, but it’s rare to encounter such confidence and originality at any moment in someone’s career trajectory. Simone is her hero, and her decision to tackle the Annette Peacock tune “Dreams (If Time Weren’t)” makes sense when you listen to the deliriously washed out original from 1968. Glass treats compositions like sun-bleached roadmaps, a rejection of the GPS-like fidelity of so many singers today, who only deploy creativity in piled-up syllables, overwrought emotion, and rigid adherence to chord patterns. But when I first heard E the signpost that hit me was the singular 1962 Ran Blake-Jeanne Lee album The Newest Sound Around (RCA). Glass possesses a much different voice than Lee—aerated and wispy to Lee’s dense, creamy timbre—but there’s a similarity in how the music on both recordings crawls like molasses, making the tunes seem to levitate rather than unfold. Glass fully understands the shape of tunes she interprets as well as the gorgeous originals—some co-written with her brother Costa Glass—that dominate the record, and she also understands how phrasing imbues words with a much richer meaning.

No song on the record demonstrates that inherent feeling like “Human Dust,” a ballad in which she set an experimental story-text by Agnes Denes to a rangy, hovering piano meditation. Glass improvised the melody spontaneously and then went on to transcribe and memorize it, the words pouring out of her like Joni Mitchell making music by reading a phone book—except the Denes story is poignant in its strange beauty. Although Glass was largely self-taught, learning piano on her family’s instrument, she has gone on study with the likes of Kris Davis, Andrew Cyrille, and Jay Clayton at the New School in New York, which might explain her deft technical understanding of harmony and rhythm, but her presence is something that can’t really be taught. She doesn’t try to hide her influences, such as the circuitous impact the sui generis Ethiopian pianist and composer Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou exerts on her instrumental tune “Emahoy,” which borrows some of the elusive little right-handed runs that distinguished the late musician’s output. Still, those purloined notions are fleeting, and do nothing to undermine Glass’s own voice.

Further, her lyrics are both poetic and clear, and she readily draws on her own experiences, whether elegantly charting how a romance can go from obsession to rejection on the opening track “All My Life,” or charting a loss of innocence on the song “Good Friends Call Me E.” The arrangements are built around voice and piano, but here and there a lean rhythm section pops up, as on my current favorite “On the Way Down,” a beautifully sorrowful meditation on loss that avoids self-pity. You can hear it below. Glass has formed a working trio with drummer Mike Gebhart and bassist Walter Stinson, a key member of trumpeter Adam O’Farrill’s quartet, and I can’t wait to hear how she interprets these songs outside of the recording, but after a dozen listens I’m still discovering plenty of nooks and crannies from these studio accounts, which were tracked at a variety of studios in the US, injecting even further sonic variety.

The Collective Spells Cast by Natural Information Society and Bitchin Bajas

I suppose some listeners would consider Totality (Drag City), the newly released second collaboration between Bitchin Bajas and Natural Information Society, ambient music, and considering its soft edges, glacial pace, and meditative vibe I can see why that conclusion might be reached. I have little hesitation calling current manifestations of ambient music among the most vacuous scourges of our time. It’s hard for me to think of anything as wasteful, lazy, and boring. I say this as someone who will happily spend hours listening to a single chord played by Tony Conrad. But most of what passes for ambient music these days just feels like a modern gloss on new age, with billowing synth chords or shallow Satie-esque piano figures repeating ad infinitum with no meaningful variation, exploration, or grit. But despite its subtlety, this music is in constant motion. If most music dubbed ambient functioned like this, I doubt I would possess the same hostility toward an entire genre.

Either way, I’ve been thrilled getting lost in Totality, and tracking its swirling transformations. I enjoyed the first joint project these two groups made a decade ago on Autoimaginary, but their undeniable growth, assurance, and sophistication of this sequel is something else. Three of the fourth lengthy tracks are group improvisations, while Joshua Abrams wrote “Always 9 Seconds Away.” Yet they’re all of a piece, tracing a meticulous arc between the placid opener “Totality” to the closer “Clock no Clock,” each subsequent track gradually accruing increased energy and density as the album unfolds. Abrams and Cooper Crain edited and mixed the album, presumably shaping wide-open improvisations with a gradual sense of development that leaves spontaneity on the table, as if Terry Riley’s Shri Camel has been freeze-dried, and little cross sections are expanded in real-time. Considering the firepower of seven musicians it’s remarkable how pared back the music is. It’s often hard to discern who’s doing what within the swirl of synthesizers and electronics from Crain and Rob Quinlivan and the harmonium of Lisa Alvarado, a gauzy, slowly churning blend often shadowed by Rob Frye’s flute and Jason Stein’s bass clarinet, but more often than not it’s the guimbri tones of Abrams that ultimately shape each piece. On the opener his notes are spread far apart, like a slow-motion pulse occasionally answered by a distant-sounding fill from drummer Mikel Patrick Avery, until a firm, cymbal-driven groove emerges toward the end of the 17-minute jam. That track hints at stasis, rhythmically, at least, but the shimmering colors and timbres are constantly morphing, an organic, quilt-like unfolding where any seam is dissolved by bliss.

The concise “Nothing Does Not Show” is more forceful, with smudged guimbri tones and a thump on the instrument linking with lean rimshots from Avery. Aerated synth arpeggios are complemented by fluttering flute passages and serene, meditative bass clarinet, all exerting a phantom-like presence. “Always 9 Seconds Away” is underlined by an off-kilter see-sawing Avery pattern that develops almost imperceptibly as a unison flute-bass clarinet-double bass melody is held aloft by various keyboard tattoos and swells. In fact, Avery is almost the focal point, adding depth and intensity to the same fixed groove as the 13-minute piece proceeds, while over time Stein and Frye increasingly improvise and ornament the initial unison parts, suggestion a psychedelic invocation of classic cool jazz verities amid thickening bass, synth, and harmonium. “Clock no Clock,” which you can hear below, is the most active piece on the album, with thick, twangy guimbri and steady cymbal play setting the tone, producing a powerful denouement from rapid acceleration that still maintains the shape-shifting hypnosis of the album’s most reserved passages. As a whole, the album takes us on a genuine excursion rather than sitting in place, too easily satisfied like most ambient music these days.

Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week

April 29: Jeb Bishop, Matthias Müller, Matthias Muche, trombones; Kaffe Matthews, live sampling alchemical electronics, and Han-earl Park, electric guitar, 8 PM, Richten25, Gerichtstraße 25, 13347 Berlin

April 30: The Centrifugal Quartet (Jeb Bishop, trombone, Mia Dyberg, alto saxophone, Antonio Borghini, double bass, and Michael Griener, drums), 8 PM, Panda Theater, Knaackstraße 97, (i.d. Kulturbrauerei, Gebäude 8) 10435, Berlin

April 30: Pip (Fredrik Rasten, guitars, and Torstein Lavik Larsen, trumpet), 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin

May 1: Nduduzo Makathini (Nduduzo Makathini, piano, vocals, Jakob Sorensen, trumpet, flugelhorn, Omagugu, vocals, Sophie Ribstein, harp, Tsepo Pooe, cello, Dalisu Ndlazi, double bass, and Lukmil Perez, drums), 7:30 PM, Pierre Boulez Saal, Französische Straße 33d, 10117 Berlin

May 1: Erhart Hirt, guitar, electronics, Axel Dörner, trumpet, electronics, Alexander Frangenheim, double bass, and Michael Griener, drums, 8 PM, studioboerne45, Börnestraße 43/45, 13086 Berlin

May 1: Raymond McDonald, saxophone, with the Berlin Improvisers Orchestra, 8 PM, Exploratorium, Zossener Strasse 24, 10961, Berlin

May 1: eraserhead (Camila Nebbia, tenor saxophone, Vinicius Cajado, double bass, and
Mauricio Takara, drums), 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin

May 2: Tommaso Vespo, piano, Ben Lehmann, double bass, and Martial Frenzel, drums, 8 PM, Terzo Mondo, Grolmanstraße 28, 10623 Berlin

May 2: Julius Gawlik, clarinet, saxophone, Felix Henkelhausen, double bass, and Oli Steidle, drums, 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin

May 3: Bob Ostertag, gamepad controller & modular software synthesizer; Nic Collins, voice, video, dead circuits, live software, and a woodpecker, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin

May 3: Die Enttäuschung (Rudi Mahall, clarinets, Axel Dörner, trumpet, Jan Roder, double bass, and Kasper Tom, drums), 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin

May 5: Lisa Ullén, piano, Lisen Rylander Löve, saxophone, voice, electronics, and
Aaron Lumley, double bass; Gonçalo Almeida, double bass, 8 PM, Richten25, Gerichtstraße 25, 13347 Berlin