Nicolas Collins, solo improvisation on !trumpet

Click to play (different every time)

With every passing year I have less interest in making recordings. This is in part my acceptance of the downside of the remarkable ease and low cost of the recording and distribution processes: how (and why) would anyone find Nic's needle in the web haystack? But I also acknowledge that my interest lies in the unpredictability of live performance; a recording of any one performance exudes a false sense of completeness and stability; choosing "the best" of three takes verges on the existential, and editing becomes an exercise in indecisiveness.

I spent the second half of 2020 in a country house on the New England coast. Covid 19 shut down concert culture and isolated me from my fellow musicians. A microphone and a camera are no substitutes for collaborators or an audience, but under the circumstances they pushed me to play.

Although I've been performing live electronic music since my teenage years, I've never mastered a traditional instrument; instead, under the influence of David Tudor, Gordon Mumma and their ilk, I cobbled together circuits and software on a bespoke basis: one network per composition. It wasn't until I built my "trombone-propelled electronics" in 1986 that I found anything flexible enough to adapt to multiple contexts, including improvisation. I retired the last version of the instrument in 2008, bored with its vocabulary of live sampling and signal processing, but eventually the urge to improvise pushed me back into the hybrid instrument fray: a trumpet with a built-in speaker, Hall-effect sensors reading valve positions, a breath control and an infrared-equipped toilet plunger (valving and mute movement acoustically filters the built-in speaker).

For 40 years I had chosen technologies according to guidelines that, while perhaps seeming arbitrary, were based on direct experience: homemade circuitry for touch and instability; software for accurate control and autonomous decisions; musicians for distributed intelligence. With this new instrument I gave myself the challenge of confounding these assumptions: programming a computer to behave and sound like a glitching circuit, and to scramble the interface sufficiently that playing has to be learned afresh on each re-boot.

In the last months of 2020 I recorded a few dozen short solos on this instrument. With invaluable assistance from Nick Briz (the genius who coded Pea Soup To Go for me), I wrote a simple JavaScript program that shuffles the videos, so that every time you play Lucky Dip you hear new material in a different order. You can hit "return" to jump ahead to the next clip.

(Click here to read more about the !trumpet instrument)