This week my first novel, Us Conductors, is officially published in the United States. (It came out in Canada in April.) I hope you'll read it, you out there, old friends and kindred spirits and trespassers who strayed onto this blog looking for a calm pistachio background. Us Conductors is published by Tin House Books, and you can order it via its website, or buy it in shops, or on iBooks or in kindletown, or you can come into my front garden now that summer has come and I will bring you mint tea and ice-cream and try to persuade you to buy it.

Us Conductors is a sort of love story about Lev Sergeyvich Termen, inventor of the theremin, and Clara Rockmore, its greatest player. It's a novel about invention, memory, debt, airships, orchestras, Soviet spies, American ballerinas, Siberian taiga, electric singing, killer kung-fu, blue speakeasies, and responsibility. It's about lying faith and untrue true love.

You can read the recent Kirkus review here.

I started writing this book in 2009. Its working title was IN WHICH I WIN THE LOVE OF CLARA ROCKMORE, MY ONE TRUE LOVE, FINEST THEREMIN PLAYER THE WORLD WILL EVER KNOW. Part two begins with an epigraph, a Russian saying: "Twelve months of winter / The rest is summer." There are chapters about the 1929 Crash and the the day Lenin played the theremin. The chapter titles are taken from songs by artists like Kate Bush, Jesus & Mary Chain, and Mark Hollis. There are a few gramophones, but they don't say anything.

Besides' Clara Rockmore's theremin performance of Saint-Saëns' "The Swan", the track that most influenced Us Conductors is a piece of music by Tim Hecker:

Tim Hecker - "In the Fog II".

A song like smoke; like blur, like mist. Which seems like one shapeless thing but which is in fact variegated, comprised of interconnecting parts. All this furl of organ, rise of static. All this grey colour. If you are listening closely, you can not help but search through the sound - it's like a kind of thirst.

I recently wrote about this song, and others, for Largeheartedboy's "Book Notes" series (there's an accompanying Spotify playlist). As I said there:

Is this a melody we hear, or are we imagining it? Is this meaning or its opposite? Is Hecker sending a signal, making a message? He won't say.

All our lonely lives are this: can we feel the ones beside us, or have we made a mistake?

At the end of Us Conductors, Lev Sergeyvich Termen sits alone in Moscow, haunted, listening to magnetic tape. He is searching.

Please buy my book. Buy it for your father, for father's day; or for your mother, belatedly, for mother's day. And, if you're in the US, please come see me on my upcoming book tour. Initially, I'll be visiting Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, DC, Durham, Asheville and Atlanta. These are the initial dates, with West Coast appearances to be confirmed in a couple of weeks. At each of these stops I'll be reading from the book, signing first editions, and usually I'll have a local thereminist as guest star. They'll be special, and casual, and I'd love to meet you.

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Elsewhere things:

• I wrote more than 2,000 words for HTML Giant about a YouTube video with the cutest little girl in the world.


• I was interviewed by Nardwuar, and also talked to the Hazlitt podcast about the book, warbled on a theremin.


• Litreactor proposed that in the movie adaptation of Us Conductors, Termen be played by Jude Law. (I disagree.)


• Said the Gramophone's better half, Dan Beirne, can still be seen zoiding up!!! at Spaceriders.tv.