100 of the World´s Most Beautiful Melodies


'Nicolas Collins Nicolas Collins

(with Peter Cusack, guitar and bazouki)

I find it very hard to justify making a sound – I would infinitely prefer to recycle an existing one. Most of my work is based on the adaptation and re-utilization of our culture's sonic flotsam. Fragments of radio broadcasts and other found sound material are disassembled and reconstituted into forms that defy the inherent disposability of the elements. The recombined material lives on, if only for an instant, beyond its producer's expectations, and is fitted into a context unintended by its creators. Ensemble compositions use this re-worked material to suggest melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic motifs for players, who are asked to build a performance out of a limited – and often banal – vocabulary drawn from scraps of "musical wallpaper". My music attempts the constructive subversion of popular forms, often by "misusing" the technology that produced them originally. Typical instrumentation consists of inexpensive microcomputers, home-made electronic circuits, radios, cassette players, hot-wired cheap effect boxes, and hybrid "backwards" musical instruments. These latter include guitars whose strings are resonated by various sound sources instead of being struck, and a trombone that serves as both a controller and loudspeaker for a digital sampler and signal processor. The inclusion of players of traditional instruments allows a range of non-electronic appropriation of, and variation on, the scavenged sound material that I find so intrinsically appealing.