Scanner

Battersea-based ambient composer Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner, took his inquisitive pseudonym from his compositional tool of preference: the cellphone scanner. He quickly gained a reputation like a boundary-pushing experimentalist, wedding ceremony scanned vocal examples with sparse consumer electronics and additional textural components that underscored any risk of strain and isolation connected with contemporary telecommunications technology. Though Rimbaud worked well increasingly toward additional, even more musical compositional products, his first many releases went weighty on the raised convo, appealing to commentary from postgrad pocket theorists normally as music critics. Although he accepted to a having a particular voyeuristic fixation dating back to his years as a child, Rimbaud began discovering it through music considerably later in existence, when he obtained a police scanning device through the Brixton Hunt and Saboteurs group (sort of wargames/survivalist collective) at a unexpected discount. He documented several albums — such as for example 1992’s Scanning device, 1993’s Scanning device 2, and 1994’s Mass Observation, all released on Ash International, a label he co-founded — and finished remixes for Oval, Scorn, while others. Though much less varied or complicated in his strategy as a few of his peers in the Western digital music avant-garde, Rimbaud’s probing experimentalism and developing concentrate earned him high compliment among the greater cerebral from the digital music set, producing a amount of commissioned efficiency and composition possibilities that brought him in touch with famous brands David Shea, Costs Laswell, Oval’s Markus Popp, and Karlheinz Stockhausen (the final of whom Rimbaud matters among his admirers). By the finish from the ’90s, his range had widened considerably. Released in 1999, Lauwarm Instrumentals, for example, incorporated burbling consumer electronics, somber drones, neo-orchestral atmosphere, and full-on drum’n’bass. Through the entire next 10 years, Rimbaud was just like energetic, with collaborative are frequent as correct single productions. His prolific use others is normally highlighted by 2002’s The Crystalline Address (with Kim Cascone), 2006’s Tinnito (with Rolf & Fonky), 2007’s Twisted Artifacts (with Pete Lockett, as Parallax Defeat Brothers), and 2010’s Blink of the Eye (using the Post Contemporary Jazz Quartet). He also performed electric guitar in Githead, a music group led by Colin Newman and Malka Spigel.