This book is an engaging, generous read, with first-hand details on live electronic music, the artistic fringes of academia, and community building. In between the talks and the concerts one evening of the 2016 event Over, Under, Around, and Through the Music of David Tudor (organized by Ron Kuivila at Wesleyan University), composer John Driscoll explained to me that archiving music "in the style of David Tudor" (Hecker 2009) has been done primarily through practice. Writing and even theory [2] can be part of this archival work, but Driscoll, Phil Edelstein, Ralph Jones, Ron Kuivila, and the newer participants of the Composers Inside Electronics ensemble (CIE, founded 1973 by Tudor) seem to generally prefer mostly playing and teaching this music. Collins, then, stands out in the lineages of CIE as one of its more talkative members.

Contrast this to the less decipherable Tudor. Via Collins' eventual membership in CIE and their overlapping social circles, he acted at various times as Tudor's collaborator, mentee, assistant, or peer. Tudor never wrote at length about his practice or his ideas: after his death in 1996, it would take people like You Nakai a decade and a half of collaborative and archival research resulting in a 500+ page tome (Reminded by the Instruments, 2021) to begin to piece means and results back together. Nakai's book, as engagingly exhaustive as it is (Teboul 2022), explains live electronic music from the outside in, requiring a kind of forensic curiosity. Semi-Conducting, in contrast, works from Collins' perspective outwards, describing the rich environment he's explored and built in decades of live electronics work.

Whether in books or in workshops, if you ask, Collins tends to answer the question. Until this book, Robert Ashley's Music With Roots in the Aether oral history / text (2000) was perhaps the closest to a participant's history of live electronic music. Carolyn Brown's Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham (2009) is more about dance, and Mumma's Cybersonic Arts: Adventures in American New Music (2015) is closer to a collection of past publications than a memoir. These three texts are invaluable resources to amateurs of the "post-Cagean thicket," but only Semi-Conducting offers first person, book-length insights on a life in live electronic music, from one of its dedicated practitioners.

Collins' previous text, Handmade Electronic Music, has been acknowledged for its impact on budding makers of synthesizer and electronic music instruments (see, for example, Marc Weidenbaum's recent review of Semi-Conducting in The Wire #493, or discussion in Semi-Conducting, chapter 20). Fewer have chimed in on the historical asides that pepper the tutorials, aphorisms, diagrams, and pictures. These show how Collins' circuits and tips have histories, and that they tend to be as much the product of a community of practitioners as the author's incisive and clarifying process. This lack of public attention for Collins' historical insights is unfortunate: because most people know him more for the hardware hacking advice in these books, his roles as a composer, a producer, an early adopter of computer technologies for music, and a sharp observer of his professional milieux have tended to be overlooked. Semi-Conducting compellingly addresses this.

Indeed, if live electronic music is the "music implicit in technology," (Collins 2007, 46) then these insights were the stories implicit in music technologies. Hannah Perner-Wilson's speculative Traces with Origins project (2013) finds, in Semi-Conducting,, a documentary counterpart, which links usually anonymous sounds and their electronic sources to lineages, narratives, and raisons d'être. Each circuit, setup, or tip is the crystallized work of dozens of people, distilled in a robust and expressive form by a composer who has remained committed to working with and often for others. For most circuits, Collins provided readers the corresponding box of text to make us feel like we were not just being relatively safe and having fun with ICs, but rather, a part of something bigger. This was also integral to the identity of Leonardo Music Journal (Leonardo's music and sound art variant, active 1990-2020, and edited by Collins between 1997 and 2017).

Semi-Conducting takes vignettes analogous to Handmade's asides and quilts them together. The structure of the book reflects its origin as micro-scale daily pages, where the connective tissue that links descriptions of artworks, technologies, performances, circuits, and recordings is revealed to be Collins' personal life. Twenty-three chapters and six "interludes" in 236 pages makes for short, lively sections. The progression is roughly chronological, but timelines split, skip, and circle back. College years in Connecticut setup a firm return to a childhood New York just in time for the downtown avant-garde's second-generation flourishing. Precarious success there leads to a European expatriation, eventually turning into relative artistic, academic, and familial stability. Throughout, Collins' commitment to music provides seemingly endless and sustainably paced motivation for composing and performing, usually with friends. The wide cast of characters mentioned documents a curiosity for chance encounters both radically different from John Cage's own chance music and yet not entirely unrelated.

Anyone interested in this communal nature of experimental music in its "post-Cagean" (peri-Cagean?) incarnation will find an impeccably cast movie (humans, computers, circuits…) with writing and editing that makes Semi-Conducting surprisingly hard to put down. The short but star-studded index helps readers return to anecdotes or cameos easily. Researchers will come back to the text for invaluable documentation of cross-community exchanges and of Collins' compositions (most recordings are available on the book's companion website). Newcomers will get a detailed, honest narrative introduction to some of North America's and Europe's more unusual music.

And yet as Collins acknowledges throughout the book, the live electronic music community has not historically been the most diverse. The political aspirations of both Cage and CIE-adjacent collaborators were reined in by the realities of a contemporary avant-garde in market-based societies (specifically, its New York-area variation, with all its inherited biases). Nevertheless his third edition of Handmade and his shepherding of a long run of LMJ contributors shows a commitment to expanding who had been and could be silicon luthiers, a drive which is mirrored in CIE's regularly expanding cast of participants.

Another long-term lesson reflected in the book–echoing Deb Chachra's Why I Am Not A Maker (2015)--concerns e-waste and the technological surplus that made  much of live electronic music's explorations possible. Should hacking workshops be reframed as salvage workshops? How had our shared perception of our building blocks of this practice shifted since Gordon Mumma tried to teach David Tudor vacuum tube circuit making? An aesthetic response is already offered in Collins' pieces like Salvage—Guiyu Blues (2008) or The Royal Touch (2014, see chapter 18), and those who will want a materialist read will not have to venture so far from Collins' own words.

As Collins describes it, live electronic music seems both adjacent to radical politics and, as an inheritor of process music, shy of explicit statements. It is a reflection of some composers' work of making sense of their electronic world with the biases and shortcomings this often implied and continues to imply. The worlds described in this book's first three quarters (tenure track positions? touring support from an art school?) may still exist for some but have become exceptions fragmented across contemporary ecological concerns. And yet in Collins' vivid memories of these recent pasts, we get to cobble together our imaginations of desired futures with the benefit of hindsight and the motivating fire of inevitable change.

Notes

[1] This review is dedicated to Larry Polansky, founding editor of Leonardo Music Journal, and a profoundly influential and supportive figure to many of my peers.

[2] See page 191 for a discussion of "Team Adorno" that could be required reading for all graduate art programs.

References

Ashley, Robert. 2000. Music with Roots in the Aether: Interviews with and Essays About Seven American Composers. Köln: MusikTexte.

Chachra, Deb. 2015. “Why I Am Not a Maker.” The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/384767/.

Collins, Nicolas. 2006. Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking. First Edition. New York: Routledge.

———. 2007. “Live Electronic Music.” In The Cambridge Companion To Electronic Music, 38–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. 2009. Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking. Second Edition. New York: Routledge.

———. 2020. Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking. Third Edition. New York: Routledge.

Hecker, Florian. 2009. Acid in the Style of David Tudor. CD. Editions Mego.

Nakai, You. 2021. Reminded by the Instruments: David Tudor’s Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Perner-Wilson, Hannah. 2015. “Traces With Origin.” 2015. https://www.plusea.at/?category_name=traces-with-origin.

Teboul, Ezra J. 2022. “You Nakai: Reminded by the Instruments” (Review). Computer Music Journal 45 (2): 85–90. https://doi.org/10.1162/comj_r_00597.

Weidenbaum, Marc. 2025. “Review of ‘Semi-Conducting.’” The Wire, March 2025, 71-72.

Wesleyan University. 2016. “Over, Under, Around, and Through the Music of David Tudor.” 2016. https://www.wesleyan.edu/cfa/archives/over-under-around-and-through-the-music-of-david-tudor-archive.html.