Sound future from the past

By GRAHAM REID

Londoner Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner, takes great amusement in how he's described in arty journals: cultural agitator, data pilferer, mischievous plunderer of the electronic ether ... "I just prefer composer, it's a lot easier when you pass through Customs," he laughs.

For someone who gets furrowed brows from the press and earnest over-interpretation, Scanner laughs a lot.

Due in Auckland this week to provide a live soundtrack at the Civic for Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 Alphaville at the film festival, he is concerned that those who attend his talk afterwards in the Taj Mahal Room will expect an outpouring of po-faced polysyllables. Sure he has something to say about how we respond to sound but "humour is a seductive tool because you can carry across difficult ideas in a very accessible fashion, and to me that's what's important".

"I cannot bear people talking in encoded languages. We've all been in conferences and lectures where people talk at you and you don't have a clue what they are on about. And mostly I just want people to enjoy Alphaville."

At 38 Scanner exists at the intersection of popular culture and contemporary art. His sonic landscapes, which include samples of music and found sounds from the detritus of noise around us, exist as installations in galleries but he has also placed them on British buses and his collage of movie samples is being played before Spider-Man in some London cinemas.

"These [sonic] vignettes are triggers in people's memories, so grandma taking her grandson to Spider-Man will recognise the piece from The Big Sleep but the child will recognise the piece from Toy Story."

Unlike DJs who like to find the most obscure samples ("that's fetishistic"), he prefers to re-contextualise ordinary sounds we take for granted. It's what he has been doing since he was in his teens when the family bought a taperecorder.

"I would record us having dinner, simply because you could do it. At 14 I found the school's four-track recorder and realised you could take two or three very simple sounds, juxtapose them and see what new one emerged. That may lead to another structure or sound or frame. Tape recorders have been my life," he laughs.

This man, who has kept a daily diary since age 12, taped his first overseas trip to Italy at 17 from leaving home through the airport elevator and on to the piazzas. It's a sonic photograph and when he listens to it now can vividly recall the trip.

When he was 15 he had a show on a pirate radio station ("playing appallingly bad electronica") but what he enjoyed most was when local CB radios would interfere with the music.

"I started recording those conversations, and also crossed lines you used to get on telephones. That kind of accident and chance I found intriguing, and in retrospect that's what I've been doing ever since, using voices and a lot of found sounds."

A literature graduate who reads more books than he buys CDs, and goes to more art exhibitions than he does concerts, says he loves cinema but thinks we are too readily seduced by the visuals. We don't consider how the sound effects or music are shaping our ideas of what is on the screen. Hence his appearance with Alphaville.

"I have a loose score and you can still hear the dialogue and the original music but also process some of that and add my own stuff. It's almost an alternate version of the film, but not altering it at all. It doesn't upset film buffs or manipulate the original too extremely. I've done this performance two or three times but have no clue what I did last time. I've never been interested in repeating myself or just being a jukebox."

It is easier to say what Scanner is not: not a DJ, not someone who records then tours to promote a recorded product or aural artefact. His sounds appear on some videos in the forthcoming Sonic Sampler programme in Auckland.

His installation at Paris' Pompidou Centre, with visual artist Mike Kelly, are the highly amplified sounds and images of Paris' most haunted places. An upcoming project is for a morgue just outside Paris.

"The doctors there believe the most important moment in any hospital is not the birth or survival of people but the saying farewell to someone. I have been asked to make a piece of music that would play when people come in to see the body of their loved ones.

"So I will make something elegant and gentle which is uplifting and optimistic."

* Scanner/Alphaville, Civic Theatre, Sunday July 21, 8.30pm; Sonic Sampler, Village 6, July 19, 4pm and July 20, 1.30pm.