Robin Rimbaud

 

Robin Rimbaud is an electronic sound artist who works under the name Scanner, a name derived from a device he used in early recordings which would scan airwaves for indeterminate radio or cell phone signals. He literally samples human voices that he scanned from the airwaves in his performances. He has also incorporates police scanners into his performances. He is a member of the band Githead.

In addition to being a sound artist he is also: a writer, a media critic, a multi-media artist, a record producer.

He seems to have a bit of a thing for french filmmakers. He resoundtracked Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville in live performances. He made a BBC radio production of Jean Cocteau’s The Human Voice (though this one is admittedly a play).

He has some interesting thoughts about the way we are affected by sound in an urban setting:

“What’s interesting to me is the way that we consume sound now. When I used to listen to sound when I was 16, 15 years old, I would lie in my bed in the dark and listen to a Pink Floyd album or a Brian Eno record. And you really would absorb it on so many levels. You would really breathe that record. I wonder today when we listen to music how we consume it. When we’re listening to a CD on a portable carrier, we are incorporating acoustic sound around us. How much does that become part of the work? I’ve fed that into my work. It led me to begin to ask myself questions. When you listen to techno, do you walk quicker than if you were listening to 15th century church music? If you listen to hip-hop, which generally runs at around 110 per minute, do you generally walk along at that kind of sloppy pace? It’s interesting because when people use mobile phones today, they generally, if they’re in a conversation, walk away from the group, because they’re on the telephone. It’s interesting because that suddenly becomes a private space for them, even though it’s a public space. They generally take seven to nine steps around, up and down. If you notice now I’ve said this, you start looking outside a café, you see people start to take this amount of steps. It’s really interesting, these kinds of moments. It all comes from listening. It all comes from this kind of almost obsession. It’s like, if you were to go and buy a pair of shoes tomorrow, you start looking at other people’s shoes. Because I work with sound all the time, I constantly listen to these kinds of sounds. We sit and talk now, but we embrace the sound of water coming through the system behind us, some kind of engine hum in the distance here. But once it’s erased, that noise, once the machine is switched off, we suddenly realize how noisy the environment has been.”

Another very interesting quote about his intentions with his work:

“What I’m interested in is stories. Our history of development has been through stories, in a way, through family stories, through parables. The bible is just a series of stories. And it’s really interesting because stories get changed. You have a tendency to reinterpret a story. You hear a conversation or a part of a conversation and you start to fill in the spaces, and that’s what began to interest me. Not you and I talking together, but just overhearing one part. You start to picture an image of what these people look like. Their social backgrounds. What relationship they hold to one another. And then try to fill in the spaces. When you didn’t hear what the other person was saying, what were they really talking about. You just heard a bit of a pop record, Scannerfunk, where there are these voices buried underneath the mix. These people saying things like “The sun is shining” and “I’m too sad to tell you,” and all these very melancholic phrases just keep spinning out underneath this elegant, melodramatic music. I like to use these voices on that level. “

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