Browse by Artist: SCANNER

Artist:	SCANNER
Title:	Timelapse/(Mnemosyne)
Label:	BETTE (UK)
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.50
Catalog #:	BETTE 008CD

This release features Scanner's classical/electronica score to the full-length ballet for Dutch National Ballet, which premiered at Het Muziektheater on June 17th 2011, commissioned for the Holland Festival. Choreographed by Britain-born Berlin resident David Dawson, the work reflects upon the legends from Greek mythology, across a range of moods. Spooky, sexy, percussive strings resonate a cinematic tension, while a disco-from-hell arrives and disappears and we are left in a melancholic realm of romantic strings and heart-aching emotions. Active since 1991, Robin Rimbaud -- known as Scanner -- has been intensively active in sound art, producing concerts, installations and recordings. He has remixed and collaborated with a wealth of artists across the arts, including Laurie Anderson, Bryan Ferry, Carsten Nicolai, Dangermouse, Michael Nyman, Luc Ferrari, and Mike Kelley, amongst many others.

Artist:	SCANNER
Title:	Moskau Disko
Label:	BINEMUSIC (GERMANY)
Format:	12"
Price:	$10.00
Catalog #:	BINE 012EP

"Following the success of Teenage Wochen in 2006, Scanner follows up his slippery electro trip with Moskau Disko, the warped daughter of a night spent in a digital orgy of Wagnerian creative excess on German label Binemusic, home to modest musical surprises. Terrorized vocals open the acid slip-disc party atmosphere, Kraftwerk seduce the Aphex Twin in the kitchen, and James Holden takes photographs of Paris Hilton washing up the beats, and publishes them on Myspace. This bewitchingly groove-laden Russian discothèque is contrasted by the slow motion elegance of 'Russe Traum,' as the stockings are tidied away, the curtains drawn and the lights softly dimmed. Scanner -- British sound artist, Robin Rimbaud -- explores an eclectic mix of activities that place him at the crossroads of academic and digital pop culture. 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) are hailed by critics as innovative and inspirational works of contemporary electronic music."

Artist:	SCANNER
Title:	Rockets, Unto The Edges Of Edges
Label:	BINEMUSIC (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.50
Catalog #:	BINE 018CD

This is the second full-length release for UK-based Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner on BineMusic. In his most intimate and forceful recording in years, Scanner maneuvers across fresh terrain that embraces the traditional -- guitar, vocals and string arrangements, and the more eclectic -- hundreds of found voices, radar transmissions and environmental recordings. Opening the album with "Sans Soleil" featuring Michael Gira (Swans, Angels Of Light) on guitar, Scanner sings for the first time on his album, his voice hovering through a barren landscape of fragile loops and harmonies. Crisp, distressed melodies with crushingly fat beats unite on "Pietas Ilulia" to map a cinematic landscape populated by N.E.R.D by way of Robert Fripp and John Barry. "Anna Livia Plurabelle" paints an achingly melancholic picture through which celebrated Mumbai-born soprano Patricia Rozario soars and flies with a radiant timbre. Having effectively been the muse for British composer John Taverner for some years, Rozario brings a dexterity and humane conviction to this electronic soundscape. The ghostly presence of William Burroughs and philosopher Bertrand Russell weave their way through some of the pieces, opening into the dark heart of "Yellow Plains Under White Hot Blue Sky," an epic, almost menacing work, with corrosive voices, noises and abstract shapes over a primordial electronic beat, that continues to build and ignite with bowed strings into a picturesque, precise explosion. "The Last European" casts phonetic Croatian and Korean into a rhythmic bed of pulses and instrumental melodies, tripping through itchy rhythms that entangle themselves upon one another, while "A Clearing Between Earth And Air" closes the album with a highly organic and textured mix of voices, drifting harmonies and Krautrock pulses, breeding a drifting melancholy from the union of voice and electronic and acoustic instrumentation. By far his most mature and personally sombre album, Rockets... is in equal parts sumptuous and achingly beautiful, sentimental and exploratory. Jean Baudrillard once depicted paradise as mournful, a fitting location for this ravishing soundtrack.

Artist:	SCANNER
Title:	Warhol's Surfaces
Label:	INTERMEDIUM (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	INTER 017

"It is no surprise that Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner, chose to make a one hour sound-piece of Warhol. Though, basing a 60-minute radiopiece for Bayerischer Rundfunk upon boredom, as is the case here, might seem a bit boring. Or as Warhol might have said: Gee, uhm, really up there. Because Warhol really liked boredom. He liked repetitiveness, copies, details. He liked the surface, the new technology. In fact: he would have liked to be a machine himself. Because Scanner takes the sound as Warhol took the soup; creating a universe where the looping everyday becomes interesting in the blurred domesticity most people see as the very essence of plain, repetitive boredom. Touching upon the fact that it does not matter how famous or ordinary you are: A sausage is just a sausage. Or is it? I guess it's up to each individual to choose what to make of it. Warhol and Scanner are, it seems, just showing us the cans / scan. -- Mathilde Schytz.

Artist:	SCANNER
Title:	Sound For Spaces
Label:	SUB ROSA (BELGIUM)
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	SR 119CD

"The collection Sounds For Spaces is the second Scanner rerelease on the Sub Rosa label. Outside of Scanner's controversial mobile phone scans of the time, he was also creating works for installation and radio art projects, some of which are documented on this CD. Sound for Spaces is a collection of his best unreleased works, running in reverse chronological order from 1997 back to 1984. 'Documenta X' is the sort of ambient music to give your bass bins serious trouble, 'Invisible Choirs' sounds like a walk through the inner workings of an immense cathedral organ, and 'A Piece of Monologue' makes logical connections between the emotive pull of Samuel Beckett's found phrases and the subconscious of Rimbaud's found sounds."

Artist:	SCANNER
Title:	Colofon & Compendium 1991-1994
Label:	SUB ROSA (BELGIUM)
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.50
Catalog #:	SR 341CD

Telephone terrorism tactics and voyeuristic ambience from the Scanner archive 1991-1994. Exclusive unreleased material. An eavesdropper's delight. "In the summer of 2010, I worked through my extensive archive of DAT tapes, cassettes and mini-discs, which had accumulated since 1977, and with the help of my ever-capable and patient interns, began the process of digitizing these materials. The result -- over 600 hours of largely unreleased material -- was overwhelming to say the least, and that was only the edited highlights, as we never touched any material prior to 1991. Most of these recordings have never been heard before or released, though ideas, voices and samples may have reappeared in altered forms on future releases. Very little of it is 'finished' in any sense; it is more of a thinking process, sketches towards something else, a moment of inspiration briefly captured. At the invitation of Sub Rosa, I honed down the selection to the controversial scanned telephone call works by-passing film scores, dance pieces, remixes and so on. The shorter pieces interspersed throughout the album were originally commissioned by James Lavelle for an edition of his Mo' Wax compilation label series Headz, but for unknown reasons were never included. Two of the works, 'Blind Electricity' and 'Moth Open Math,' began life as remixes for other artists but then took on a life entirely of their own so were never issued in this form. 'Underwater' was released in an edition of 100 copies on 7" vinyl on Syntatic Records Vienna, April 1995. 'Tape Junk' and 'Who Else Is There?' were released on 7" vinyl on Soul Static Sound, October 1996." -- Robin Rimbaud

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