Album Notes

Originally from rural New England and now living in New Mexico, William Fowler Collins (b.1974) is a musician whose work explores and synthesizes both musical and extramusical elements. Improvisation, field recordings, electric guitar, lap steel guitar, laptop computer, processed recordings, microcassette tape recorders, and home-made electronic devices all play roles in the creating, performing, and recording of his music.

In 2004 Collins graduated from Mills College, with an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media where he studied with Fred Frith, Annie Gosfield, Alvin Curran, Maggi Payne, Chris Brown, and Pauline Oliveros.


In March 2007, he was invited on a tour with Brightblack Morning Light and Women & Children. On September 26, 2007 he shared a bill with Ikue Mori at the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, NY.

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"There are moments on William Fowler Collins’ album Western Violence & Brief Sensuality when the echo gets so deep that the original sound is lost in a well of reverberations, when the effects overcome the raw source material. It’s a remarkable experience to follow the familiar down the rabbit hole, only to come up in a terrain of abstraction and nuance."
Marc Weidenbaum/Disquiet.com

"On his debut album, William Fowler Collins seems to will his surroundings into life, almost in a mythic way -- if the image of the electrified American West is combination of open skies, desert heat, and lost, haunted emptiness, as suggested by musicians from Ennio Morricone to Savage Republic to some of Steve Roach's collaborations, then Collins is a fine continuer of this tradition in his own way." Ned Raggett/allmusic

"Fans of guitar-based ambiance will not be disappointed with the variety of styles that Collins makes use of here - psychedelic rock, country, metal, noise, drone, and abstract avant-garde." Larry Johnson/earlabs