Rick (Richard) Foot was born in Bogota, Colombia in 1854. Graduating from the University of Colombia with a degree in metaphysics, he moved to Europe in the mid 1880s and published a series of celebrated articles, though the most notorious of these, a defence of FHBradley from a Kantian perspective in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society vol XVII, was later condemned by Russell as "largely spurious."

At the turn of the century he moved to Paris & there constructed his Celestial Pantechnicon, a random tone generator made entirely from wrought iron and string ... his laconic description of this device to Werner Heisenberg is thought to have influenced or at least prefigured a significant strand of twentieth century physics. At its debut performance the machine caught fire, an occurence variously attributed to corrosion, rats, or the intervention of a beneficent deity.

The 1930s saw the world premiere in Budapest of the first of his several string quartets, and a failed attempt in partnership with Pierre Meynard to rewrite the entirity of western literature in a 150 page volume of 10point type.

After an entirely undistiguished wartime career he disappeared into obscurity, re-emerging in the 1960s in Albania as perhaps the only significant member of the postserialist Dau collective.

A trickle of increasingly ambitious works followed. His series of pieces for virtual orchestra lacked the technological or indeed practical facilities to allow performance; later compositions relied on an ever more bizarre & ephemeral succession of improbable media - ice, sand, near-vacuum - to the extreme irritation of all concerned.

Vain attempts at a putative collaboration with the late Georges Perec resulted in a retreat into virtual existence.

He currently lives in a small shed in SE Dorset and has ambitions to be a puppeteer. He collects biscuits and his favourite colour is tarquin.