Robin Rimbaud
Robin Rimbaud (born 1970 in Southfields, London, England) is an electronic musician who works under the name Scanner due to his use of cellphone and police scanners in the early 1990s.
“He is very experimental because he is searching in a realm of sound which is not usually used for music...he has a good sense of atmosphere.” Karlheinz Stockhausen - BBC
Scanner's website - British artist Robin Rimbaud traverses the experimental terrain between sound, space, image and form, creating absorbing, multi-layered sound pieces that twist technology in unconventional ways. A true renaissance artist of digital pop culture, from his earliest controversial work using found mobile phone conversations, through to his focus on trawling the hidden noise of the modern metropolis as the symbol of the place where hidden meanings and missed contacts emerge, his restless explorations of the experimental terrain have won him international admiration from amongst others, Bjork, Aphex Twin and Stockhausen.
Since 1991 he has been intensely active in sound art, producing concerts, compositions, installations and recordings, the albums Mass Observation (1994), Delivery (1997), and The Garden is Full of Metal (1998) hailed by critics as innovative and inspirational works of contemporary electronic music. He has performed and created works in many of the world’s most prestigious spaces including SFMOMA USA, Hayward Gallery London, Pompidou Centre Paris, Tate Modern London, Palais des Beaux-Arts Lille, Kunsthalle Vienna, Bolshoi Theatre Moscow, Hanoi Opera House Vietnam and the Royal Opera House London.
Scanner is committed to working with cutting edge practitioners and has collaborated with artists from every imaginable genre: Bryan Ferry, Laurie Anderson, Carsten Nicolai, Radiohead, The Royal Ballet, Random Dance, Neville Brody, Hussein Chalayan, Shelley Fox, Douglas Gordon, Brian Eno, Michael Nyman, Luc Ferrari, Mike Kelley, Orlan, Mike Hodges, Derek Jarman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Lorraine Hunt and Peter Sellars, amongst others.
His works continually seek to break new ground: in 1994 he pioneered one of the first experimental ezines, I/O/D, in 1998 he performed Surface Noise on a London Bus around the city, in 2000 he performed over 20 KM of beach in Italy on the public speaker system, re-soundtracked Jean Luc Godards seminal film Alphaville, and controversially played 16 concerts in just one evening with a series of lookalikes across the globe. In 2003 he became the first electronic artist to ever perform in Vietnam, and in 2004 his Sound Surface work was the first ever Tate Modern sound-art commission. From 1994-2000 he curated the pioneering Electronic Lounge club at London’s ICA presenting new electronic music and media monthly.
Among his recently completed works are Europa 25, a newly commissioned National Anthem for Europe, re-arrangments of Bach’s Cantatas, soundtracks for The Royal Ballet and Random Dance Company, a string quartet Play Along, a collaboration with legendary choreographer Merce Cunningham and creating Flower Echoes work to open the Guangzhou Triennial in China. In 2006 he is presenting Night Haunts with Artangel, Sound Designing new UK Horror movie Reverb, designing a new car horn for the US, and installing a permanent artwork for the Northern Neuro Disability Services Centre in Newcastle UK.
His work can be heard on permanent display in the Science Museum London (‘Sound Curtains’) and the Raymond Poincaré hospital in Garches France as part of the bereavement suite (‘Channel of Flight’).
His BBC radio production of Jean Cocteau’s ‘The Human Voice’ won the prestigious Prix Marulic Award and most recently he won First Prize Neptun Water Prize for his installation ‘Wishing Well’ in Germany. In 1998 he became ‘Professor Scanner’ at John Moore’s University in Liverpool. He is a Contributing Editor of www.kultureflash.net, a London centric e-zine which goes out weekly via HTML email to over 24,000+ subscribers.
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