Spark Gap

Nicolas Collins – !trumpet
Birgit Ulher – trumpet, radio, speaker, objects

  1. Gimlet 05:33
  2. Plinth 06:44
  3. Riprap 05:01
  4. Scudding 10:18
  5. Spur 05:36
  6. Sea Moss 15:13
Spark Gap
Spark Gap

Relative Pitch

Downtown Music Gallery

NICOLAS COLLINS / BIRGIT ULHER – Spark Gap (Relative Pitch RPR 1245; USA) Featuring Nicolas Collins on trumpet and Birgit Ulher on trumpet, radio, speaker & objects. I remember catching Nicolas Collins for the first time at Roulette in the early to mid 1980’s playing a trombone with added effects boxes mounted on the trombone itself. The only other musician that I could recall doing anything similar was J.A, Deane, who also played his trombone through assorted effects. I heard Mr. Collins play live on several occasions in the eighties and was being mystified by his use of an odd looking electronic trombone. I bought several of his records from the 80’s and 90’s when he worked with Robert Poss (from the Band of Susans) and Peter Cusack. I lost touch of his whereabouts when he moved to the Netherlands in the early 1990’s.

In the mid 1990’s I became aware of German trumpeter Birgit Ulher and heard her recordings with Gino Robair, Damon Smith and Mazen Kerbaj. Aside from recording dozens of records for Creative Sources, Balance Point Acoustics and Another Timbre, Ms. Ulher has recorded two previous releases with other experimental trumpeters Leonel Kaplan and Franz Hautzinger for the Relative Pitch label. This is her third double trumpet disc.

Although this is a trumpet duo, both trumpeters have very different approaches. Birgit Ulher uses metal sheets, radios, milk frothers & everyday objects to alter her trumpet sound while Nicolas Collins programmed a computer system to imitate hacked circuits which are wired to a speaker inside of his instrument. This session was recorded at a studio in Berlin in September of 2024. The trumpets are closely mic’d with an assortment of trumpet-like sounds and a variety of electronic glitches and other odd unpredictable sounds.

Whether playing acoustically or using electronics, the sounds are focused and blend both sounds into an oft quiet yet fascinating brew. Some of the electronic sounds are subtle and sound like some of the sounds we hear on our phones or computers. Patience and close listening is required here as the sounds unfold slowly and carefully. Patience and introspection for subtle sounds is required to help appreciate this disc.

Bruce Gallanter on Downtown Music Gallery newsletter

Percorsi Musicali

Spark Gap brings together two idiosyncratic, experimental trumpeters.

Birgit Ulher is a German, Hamburg-based composer and sound artist who has developed a range of extended playing techniques and preparations for the trumpet, allowing her to craft a unique language centred around sound, focusing on its microtonal aspects, fragmentation, and spatial dimension. She works with the trumpet, radio, metal sheets, and everyday objects to produce electronically resonant sounds using purely acoustic means, and is deeply intrigued by the relationship between silence and sound.

Nicolas Collins is an American, Berlin-based composer, educator and scholar (he wrote the books Handmade Electronic Music – The Art of Hardware Hacking, Routledge, and Semi-Conducting: Rambles Through the Post-Cagean Thicket, Bloomsbury). He uses homemade electronic circuitry with his trumpet and designed software for feedback manipulation, sampling, and remixing. He also designed software for creating a site-specific realization of Alvin Lucier’s landmark composition, I am sitting in a room (1969, Lucier was his teacher at Wesleyan University in the 1970s).

Spark Gap is the debut album of the working duo of Ulher and Collins, recorded in September 2024 at sound engineer and designer Adam Asnan’s studio in Berlin, following their performances in Europe, Chicago, and Colombia.

Collins plays !trumprt (a nod to David Tudor’s legendary composition Bandoneon! (A Combine…), but whereas for Tudor the exclamation mark was a sign for the factorial, Collins uses its logical meaning of negation: this is definitely not a trumpet) – a trumpet connected to electronics, and programmed a computer to imitate hacked circuits and wired it to a built-in speaker, sensors reading valve positions, a breath control, and an infrared mute. Ulher plays the acoustic trumpet, but uses metal sheets, radios, milk frothers, and other everyday objects to extend her sound palette from brass to silicon.

The six pieces suggest fast and nuanced sonic conversations, often sounding like cryptic transmissions, or chaotic but eccentric, playful sonic collisions. Collins and Ulher’s supposedly opposed approaches transform their trumpets’ sonic spectrum into a whole new, highly expressive, sci-fi-tinged, and otherworldly but surprisingly similar vocabulary, always stressing their completely free, poetic sonic imagination.

Eyal Hareuveni on Percorsi Musicali

Bad Alchemy

Neues Jahr, altes Spiel. Schlag auf Schlag guter Stoff von Newcomern und von Nam­haften. Wie etwa NICOLAS COLLINS und BIRGIT ULHER mit Spark Gap(RPR1245). Sie mit Trumpet, Radio, Speaker, Objects, er mit !trumpet. Nach seiner „Devil’s Music“ (1985), seinem Auftritt bei „Captured Music“ in Karlsruhe 1987 und seinen Schmauchspuren bei Third Person, Guy Klucevsek und Jon Rose in den 90ern ist er mir aus dem Hörfeld geraten, obwohl er mit seiner Familie ein Börliner wurde. In seiner Downtown-Zeit schon ein Pionier der Sonic Fiction, bildet er mit Ulher ein Topteam, um mit Aliens zu kommu­nizieren. Jedenfalls hört sich ihr mit Press-, Brodel- und Spucklauten gespickter Zungen­twist so an, als könnten sie sogar für intelligente Nachfahren von Klopfkäfern oder von Knorpeltang dolmetschen.

Rigo Dittmann, BA 132 rbd, badalchemy.de