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Music

Scanner's High Frequency Work Ethic Takes On UVA's Traveling Sculpture

The prolific electronic musician gives the newest iteration of UVA’s traveling sculpture an emotive sonic treatment.

A brief scan of Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner's, Wikipedia page reveals a prolific career that encompasses writing, media art, record production, and electronic music (which itself includes his solo work, a staggering collection of collaborative projects and the band Githead, featuring members of Wire). One might wonder how a single man could possibly do so much, but when we caught up with the hyperactive musician over Skype last week, it was easy to see how he got it all in. The man simply does not stop. Not even to pause for air. We were hard pressed to even get a word in edge-wise, so rapid were his breathless, enthusiastic recounts of recent projects and commissions.

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Just that day, Rimbaud had completed a piece of music for the 20th anniversary celebration of Candoco Dance Company, a UK-based organization that integrates able and disabled performers. (Apparently, the company called for a piece of music that was "a combination of Cher, meets Lady Gaga, meets Journey," a unique challenge for the experimentally inclined musician.) Later that evening, he was headed to the opening of Breaking Points, an installation project examining the dilapidated beauty of crumbling Nazi bunkers located on the coast of northern France, which he collaborated on with British artist Thomas Lock and Hellicar & Lewis. He had also recently finished a very ambitious 17-minute piece for the Dutch National Ballet, working in collaboration with German generative artist Eno Henze, who designed digital animations for the 22 meter stage. And somehow, amidst all this, he managed to find two spare hours to write and record the sonic accompaniment for the newest iteration of UVA’s traveling light sculpture.

A trailer for Scanner’s recent commission for the Dutch National Ballet, in collaboration with artist Eno Henze.

His latest collaboration with UVA, entitled Room With A View is set to make its debut tomorrow at our event in São Paulo, taking place at the famed Biennial Pavilion. We caught up briefly with the sonic wizard to find out more about his lightning fast creative process and ongoing collaborative work with UVA.

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The Creators Project: How in the world do you do all the projects that you do?
Scanner: I feel extremely grateful and fortunate that I get to work on really extraordinary projects. I seem to be on speed dial when certain people are confused or don't know what to do with projects. They think, "Let's call that Scanner guy, he might have a solution, or he moves quite quickly," and I tend to work very quickly on projects. I mean, this UVA project is a good example. It's the third project we've worked on this year and, literally, this piece, everything was done in about two hours. It's ridiculous. I work so quickly and I'm fairly good at being able to be quite intuitive. Years of making work teaches you how to gauge what people are looking for. We didn't even meet to talk about this piece. I received one e-mail and some notes and I just had an idea for the piece and I sent it over and one of the guys just wrote back and said, "Wow! That's perfect. Can you send it to us, please, the full quality version."

You work so very, very quickly. When you conceive of a mood or emotion that you want to convey, do you know immediately the sound that is going to illicit that?
I think that's the good thing, actually, I generally do. My solution often with projects, just to give one of my trade secrets away, is that I use my voice.
What's always important to me is that no matter what we're talking about, whether we're talking about ideas or use of technology, it maintains a very real relationship, and the voice is something that we all respond to, the voice is something that we all have an immediate emotive relationship with. I tend to try to use very naturalistic sounds, even when I'm using electronic sounds, processed sounds, I still try and maintain a very humanistic, naturalistic sound so it isn't an extreme. I realized that emotive connection works extremely well for difficult ideas or difficult projects and can seduce the participant or the viewer or the spectator into the work, which is one of the most important things.

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That's amazing because it's really hard to establish that emotional connection, especially with digital mediums.
It is. I suppose I come from a background of instruments, you see. I come from a background of playing piano (extremely badly—the most successful time I've ever had with the piano is when I won a Mars chocolate bar when I was a teenager at a piano competition). I play the guitar and I have a rock band and I, you know, I know how to rock. I realized that the work I respond to, the work that moves me most and engages me most, is clearly work that I have an emotional relationship to. I am a cerebral person at times, like we probably all are, and can be nerdy in that way and be drawn simply to ideas, but at the same time, what's really important to me is that it has a direct relationship to you as a spectator, and you feel something immediately. The work with UVA is about that. I want people to walk into this space or around or towards it and have that kind of emotional relationship. I want them to be absolutely seduced by it, by the sound. And then obviously join my fan club, buy the t-shirts, wear the baseball cap, all that kind of thing. [laughs]

UVA’s Conductor sculpture (below) was a monumental gateway at the Nuit sonores festival in France.

So what kind of mood did you want to strike with this new piece for UVA? What emotions did you want to elicit?
I mean, they sent me notes kind of explaining what the piece was, and I focused on particular words, "monochromatic," they wrote, and they said there would be mirrors and it was about reflection, volume, limitation, this kind of thing. I thought, the other piece, Conductor, is very, not antagonistic, but it's explosive, it's theatrical. It's very dramatic, it's outdoors, it's 16 meters high, it's hugely epic.

This new piece, Room With A View, needs to fit in a family of other works in an interior space, so it needs to be one of the family and not interrupt. You don't want it to be like Christmas and your aunt coming to visit and talking louder and more annoyingly than the rest of your family. You want it to sit comfortably. But also, I kept thinking this time, you actually will spend inside the piece. Previously, the Conductor was largely an experience from outside. Yes, you could walk through it, but most people would experience it from a distance. This time, the concept was this kind of internal relationship where you're immersed in the work. So, I made a piece that's very warm, in a way, very emotionally warm, and uses very, very sensual sub-base so you actually have this really deep vibration. Now, I'm not suggesting it's a big vibrator, but I want it to be a pleasurable experience, I wanted it to be seductive and yet very reductive. So the shape of it came together extremely quickly. I just used a voice, and the voice is spinning around the space, moving from speaker to speaker. And every now and then the bass, rather like a subway train beneath your feet, rushes through and hovers there for a while and there's no way of gauging where it's going to go next. That's what I like about it as well—it doesn't follow a time signature. There are lots of instances where it will appear and disappear, so sonically it's both inviting and surprising.

How did this collaboration come about initially? Have you guys worked together before?
We've known each other for some years. We met each other in Montreal maybe six or seven years ago, and all that time we'd bump into each other and always say, "Hey! We should try and do something!" and then just this year, I think it was Matt said to me, "Let's do something." And we just did it remarkably quickly. They gave me a week. They suddenly came to me and said, "Oh, we think we could do something with you at la Gaîté in Paris, would you like to do it? It's got to be done by Friday," and this was something like Monday. So literally, I just went to Paris for the day, looked at the space, came back and made the piece. And the same with this, they invited me to do this, I think last week, and I started it on Tuesday morning and it was finished Tuesday lunchtime. Funny, isn't it?

That’s downright incredible. What do you think it is about this particular collaboration that made it such a success?
Collaborations are always about trusting the other person and having respect for what they do. I've always admired what they've done I was always hoping for the opportunity that we may make something together and it worked out remarkably simply, very low stress. The important thing for me is, and again, it's idealistic, and we all think this, but given the chance to work on these projects, I want to enjoy them. I want to reap pleasure from them. It's not about making lots of money and getting rich and successful, it's about making work that you can share with others and it's a joy to do.