Semi-Conducting: Rambles Through the Post-Cagean Thicket

Chapter 11: Devil's Music


1: A Hidden Switch

2: I am Sitting in a Classroom

3: Worlds of Music

4: Four Ridiculously Large Speakers

Interlude: Multitrack

5: Playing with Chips

6: The Infinite Amplification of Silence (or I Ching for Dummies)

7: Old Guard Avant Garde

8: Newcastle to Narvik

9: The Eden Before Apple

10: A Bright Red Electric Guitar

Interlude: 33 1/3

11: Devil's Music

12: Planes, Trains and Step-Down Transformers

13: A Computer Walks into a Bar

14: We Were All Seated Around the Campfire

Interlude: Soundcheck

15: Still Lives

16: STEIM -- IRCAM with a Human Face

Interlude: Silence

17: Whistling in the Woods

18: Strange Heaven

19: Art School

Interlude: How Things Work

20: Hardware Hacking

21: Salvage

22: The Missing Switch

Interlude: Things I'd Like to Own

23: Surprise Me

A screenshot of Grandmaster Flash performing his Turn in Charles Ahearn's 1983 film, Wildstyle, as seen about 15 seconds into this CLIP on YouTube.

Nicolas Collins, Is She/He Really Going Put With Him/Her/Them? (1982). Computer-controlled mixer cuts between sixteen inputs whenever the beats coincide -- beat-matching for the lazy.

Cover of Western Eyes, Trace Elements LP 1984, which the author mixed with the same automated mixer used for Is She/He Really Going Put With Him/Her/Them? Photo shows home studio mid-session, with mixer between two tape recorders -- click image for larger version. Tracks can be heard HERE.

Nicolas Collins, Devil's Music, Trace Elements LP (1985)
(Click on cover image for pdf of both sides of the LP jacket.)

Devil's Music A

Devil's Music B

Nicolas Collins, Real Landscape, Banned Cassette (1988)
(Click on cassette image for pdf of full packaging.)

Real Landscape A

Real Landscape B

Except from a live performance of Devil's Music at Southern Danceworks, Birmingham, Alabama, December 1987. Camerawork by Dorah Funmilayo Rosen.

Who stole it first?
Top: Con Edison, found on the street in NYC, c. 1982.
Bottom, left to right: Nicolas Collins, Devil's Music (Trace Elements Records, 1985, design by Amy Bernstein); Fidelity Jones, Piltdown Lad (Dischord Records, 1989); David Lynch, The Big Dream (Sacred Bones Records, 2013).