Rick Nance is from the Southeast United States, now living in Leicester, UK.
As a free improvisor he has performed with Trans Musiq, Wally Shoup, Southern Danceworks, Liquid Brick and Phantom Limb. He composes music as a plastic art. In practice it is as much like painting and sculpture as it is to written or performed music.
As a result of his investigations into plastic sound and his personal attachment to instrumental performance, he has extended his initial enquiry regarding aural models as a replacement for the written score.
Listening is my central practice and acousmatic composition is the inevitable result. I am interested in many aspects of sound art, but music is, of course, the primary one. Some of my work is arguably (and has been argued to be) 'not music,' depending on the definitions of music one prefers. But John Cage once remarked that you don't have to call it music if the term offends you.
I am from all over the southeastern United States, but lived more than half my life in Birmingham, Alabama. My early training was in ukelele, piano, trumpet, cycle racing, skateboarding, printing, graphic design, irrigation and a short stint as an apprentice goldsmith. In the past few years I have acquired an ability to cut a straight line with an acetyline-oxygen torch. I am also generally familiar with the controls on a 29,000kg Komatsu crawler.
In addition to my BA in music, I earned a BSc in psychology, gaining an interest in behavioural biology as a possible path to a coherent aesthetic theory. Much of what I learned of biological and ecological psychology helps shape my ideas on form and heavily influenced my PhD research.
I was introduced to free improvisation by Trans Museq. My first public gig was organized by Wally Shoup, playing with Glenn Engstrand and Keith Collins.
I did a residency at BEAST in 1997, then went on to pursue independant research in acousmatics and free improv at my own studios in Alabama. I landed about 20 miles east of Cable Bay in Bangor, Wales, to study with Andrew Lewis. There I made The Transatlantic Half-Pipe and continued development on This is Not a Model. After which I was offered a place at De Montfort University to complete my PhD with John Young.