Nicolas Collins : Strange Heaven

Nicolas Collins is an electronic music composer who deals primarily with sampled and re-sampled sound and homemade electronics. He experimented for a while with a setup he called "trombone-propelled electronics" where he uses the slide of the trombone as an analog controller for on-the-fly digital sampling. It's pretty cool, really, to a geek like me.

His album Sound without Picture is a selection of spoken word pieces he's collected, each of which has to do with a sense, or the lack thereof: sight, blindness, touch, smell, sound, deafness, taste. These are read over different electronic backdrops that he creates. In one piece he uses a broken CD player playing a string quartet which creates the backdrop for a live trumpeter, all of which creates a backdrop for the reading. On a different track, he has a real string quartet recreate the effect of the broken CD player, along with the trumpet and the reading. Very sweet. So much so that this was almost the track I picked for you.

But instead, I'm going with a different track. For one, the track was, on the surface, very similar to "Mom's" which we debuted a few days ago. (I think the interplay of the broken robotic digital repetition and the live analog is cool enough to warrant a new post, but that will have to be some other day.)

For another, the track I chose uses the aforementioned tricky trombone to manipulate the sound of the spoken parts which is then used as the bed for the actual spoken word. The voice is stretched and warped, digitally processed almost beyond recognition, but there's a ghostly hint of the source that wafts through and really underscores the intangible dreaminess of the pitch black world of the blind and the purposeful daydream of memory, both of which are subjects for the spoken part of the piece.

The composition has plenty of space around the vocals where there is just that ethereal sound and the source material he reads is really touching. On top of which, he has a great speaking voice, solid without being overtly dramatic. It's really a great composition all around.

"Strange Heaven" can be found on Nicolas Collins' 1999 release, Sound Without Picture. It's a fantastic CD. Highly recommended.

And once again, the piece is 13 minutes long, so I downsampled it. I couldn't go to mono though, as stereo is an important part of the piece, so it still ended up being 13mb. Sorry.

[You can listen to Nicolas Collins' "Strange Heaven" by navigating to the post "Song045" and clicking or right-clicking on the title or the link.]

---