VP: What made you take the theremin more seriously? It seemed like a punchline someone might wheel out onstage as part of a science demonstration. It didn’t really hold that much interest for me. I have a clear recollection of seeing one onstage in the early 2000s at a Wolf Parade gig in Montreal, but by then I knew it as this kind of joke of an instrument. I probably heard it on some old science fiction films, or I may have run into one at the Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa, growing up. SM: I honestly don’t remember, but I feel like I knew of it since I was a kid. VP: The theremin is a curious instrument and an interesting one to write about. Music journalist Vincent Pollard spoke with Sean Michaels this summer about the inspiration behind the book, what it is to blur the lines between fact and fiction, and how his background as a music journalist influenced the writing of the novel. Equal parts tense spy novel, heart-wrenching tale of unrequited love and history of the most unlikely of instruments, Us Conductors tells the story of the theremin’s invention in Leninist Russia and Lev Termen’s obsession with Clara Reisenberg (later Rockmore), who was fifteen years his junior and one of the first virtuoso players of the then prototype instrument. Based on the true story of Lev Termen, inventor of the theremin-one of the world’s first and weirdest electronic instruments-Sean Michaels’s debut novel Us Conductors was published last year by Random House Canada and subsequently won the prestigious Giller Prize.
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