Scanner

Battersea-based ambient composer Robin Rimbaud, performing as Scanner, derived his unusual alias from the cellphone scanner central to his creative process. He soon built a profile as an innovative experimentalist, fusing intercepted vocal fragments with austere electronics and additional textural layers that evoked the tension and detachment tied to contemporary telecommunications. Although Rimbaud later gravitated toward alternative, more melodic compositional tools, his earliest releases leaned heavily on captured conversations, drawing notice from postgraduate cultural theorists alongside music journalists.

While he traced a voyeuristic interest to childhood, Rimbaud channeled it musically only after purchasing a police scanner at an unexpected discount from the Brixton Hunt and Saboteurs group, a wargames and survivalist collective. He issued several albums, among them 1992’s Scanner, 1993’s Scanner 2, and 1994’s Mass Observation, all on the Ash International label he co-founded, and supplied remixes for Oval, Scorn, and additional artists.

Though his techniques never matched the breadth or intricacy of certain peers in the European electronic avant-garde, Rimbaud’s probing experimentalism and sharpening focus earned respect among the more reflective listeners in electronic music, generating numerous commissions for performances and compositions that linked him with David Shea, Bill Laswell, Oval’s Markus Popp, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, whom Rimbaud counted as an admirer. By the close of the 1990s his palette had broadened markedly. Adoption of deliberate, weighty breakbeats and foreboding textures aligned him with the illbient movement, and he partnered with DJ Spooky on 1999’s The Quick and the Dead. Lauwarm Instrumentals, issued the same year, integrated burbling electronics, somber drones, neo-orchestral ambience, and full drum’n’bass.

Rimbaud grew still more productive in the twenty-first century, issuing collaborative projects at a rate comparable to his solo output. Highlights among the joint releases include 2002’s The Crystalline Address with Kim Cascone, 2006’s Tinnito with Rolf & Fonky, 2007’s Twisted Artifacts with Pete Lockett as Parallax Beat Brothers, and 2010’s Blink of an Eye with the Post Modern Jazz Quartet. He also played guitar in Githead, the band led by Colin Newman and Malka Spigel. Rimbaud has worked with several choreographers and supplied scores for ballets, some later appearing on albums such as Nemesis (2002) and Timelapse/(Mnemosyne) (2011). His music, whether solo or collaborative, grew increasingly lush and cinematic, often incorporating neo-classical elements. In 2016 he pivoted toward pop with Scanni, a collaboration with singer Anni Hogan. The Great Crater, an eerie ambient album inspired by odd circular formations visible in Antarctica, and the organic, rhythmic full-length Fibolae both surfaced near the end of 2017. In 2019 Rimbaud joined clarinetist Gareth Edwards for Footfalls.