MICHAEL COLLIGAN: Hi. I'm Michael Colligan and I play dry ice.

[MICHAEL COLLIGAN PLAYING DRY ICE]

It's basically compressed CO2 and it's -- I'm not sure. I can't remember the exact minus figure but it's like –130 or -180, somewhere in that, and so it's basically gas compressed and then instead of melting, what it's doing is it's sublimating or evaporating just into the air so I usually use a heating element of some sort, and you heat up the metal.

This metal is kind of colder now but it's still going to do something. Once the metal gets to the temperature...,

[MICHAEL COLLIGAN DEMONSTRATING DRY ICE TECHNIQUE]

...basically what's happening is that the metal -- it's basically it's like a reversible what the call the Leidenfrost effect. Leidenfrost was, you know, when you take a hot skillet and you take water and you throw it on top and it skids across, and the water basically is evaporating so fast that it doesn't have time to settle, it just keeps on moving, and so basically it's kind of a reverse effect what's happening here. What's happening is that the metal is digging into the ice and it's causing friction. It's causing the gas to be released quicker so you have that kind of -- just imagine like all these, all of the gas bubbles or whatever being released as the metal is going into it. That's what causes the friction and also causes the vibrations of the metal, depending on what kind of metal it is.

For instance, like if I take this, this is like a coffee maker where you put your filter and put your coffee in it or stuff like that, if I just roll it across here...

[MICHAEL COLLIGAN PLAYING DRY ICE WITH COFFEE MAKER METAL APPARATUS]

...and it sounds like the brakes on a train or something, you know.

Now the tea kettle is probably my best utility that I've ever found. It was actually the first thing I ever played with dry ice because the reason I started playing dry ice was I used to work at Baskin Robbins, it was my first job in high school, and they used to ship all the ice cream in dry ice so I would take the dry ice and we'd have to put it in this big metal sink, and the metal sink would basically groan and creak and do all kinds of strange sounds. At the time though, since I was a painter, I was really into the visual I get the smoke coming out into the front of the store and I'd make a dramatic entrance whenever some old lady would come in for ice cream, you know, with the smoke coming out when I go open up the door. Some years later, I started remembering that, you know, I wonder if I could do this and recreate the same thing, so I lived at a place where I had a big old sink and I got it, and of course I just had it in the kitchen, and the first thing that was on the stove that I picked up was a tea kettle. And I believe, if I remember, it was this tea kettle, so this has been with me since the beginning.

[MICHAEL COLLIGAN PLAYING DRY ICE WITH TEA KETTLE]

And you can get different sounds. Now this metal isn't super-heated so it's going to not be as lively. Later on, when the metal is heated, you'll see how long -- it'll go a lot longer, the sound will, because it takes a little while for it to cool down and you can get actually like a lot of different tones and notes from the tea kettle.

[MICHAEL COLLIGAN PERFORMING WITH DRY ICE AND TEA KETTLES]

There's not really many safety issues unless you're going to be in a cubicle no bigger than yourself and that was just you and the block and you were going to be sealed inside because it's CO2 so you're basically it's taking your oxygen away. There's actually warnings on some of the tape sometimes that they put on saying "Do not put near pets," because what's happening is it's going down to the floor, and so the pets are down there trying to breathe, and if you fill a small room up with CO2 and they don't have, you know, they can't breathe, then that's a problem.

You want to have it so that there's a little bit of air that will escape, but if you keep it in like a cooler -- I have a cooler -- and then put a towel on it, it could last for a day. It'll be smaller. I mean right now, as we speak, you can see it's getting -- the shaping differently it's actually shrinking, but you'll still be able to use some of it to play.

A lot of people at the show will come up and reach for it to see where it is, and most people don't realize that when you touch that, it's like basically putting your hand in fire. You will blister up almost immediately if you grab it too hard or leave it for too long at a time. You can touch it real quick. That's fine. You might even get a little red spot from doing that, but if you actually put your finger and held it there, you would get blistered just like fire.

Wear gloves when you first start out because I was -- you have to -- it takes time to get to know. When you're super-heating metal and when you're going right into super-cold, you got to be careful, and I bought a pair of gloves, one of my first solo concerts and I thought they were hear resistant, and they weren't, and they melt into my hands while I was playing, which was not fun so make sure they're real heat resistant gloves if you're going to use them.