SCANNER IS the nom de guerre of the already wonderfully-named Robin Rimbaud, the shaven-headed performance artist/ambient maverick/telephone terrorist/eminent headfucker who s been causing a stir on the avant garde UK art scene for the past couple of years, due to his pioneering use of sampled telephone dialogue in his work.
His new album, Delivery, is a compelling collection of ambient noir which owes as much to the 1970s/1980s experiments of LaMonte Young and Philip Glass as it does to the modern-day futurism of Aphex Twin and The Future Sound Of London.
An affable, easygoing sort, he s refreshingly eager to explain the ideas behind his work and the motivations that drive him. So, following three cancellations of this interview (one of them occurring because his plane was grounded at Vilnius airport due to an IRA bomb scare at Heathrow), we finally link up over you guessed it the phone. Jesus Christ, stuck in a Lithuanian airport for five hours, he chuckles. What a glamorous life I lead!
Robin Rimbaud first came to the media s attention with the release of his 1994 album Spore, but he s been perfecting his eavesdropping science for rather more than three years.
I ve been recording voices for years now, almost 19 in fact, he explains. I bought a little recording Walkman when they first came out, but before that I had a really cheap little tape-recorder used to record my family, my schoolfriends, everything. And I ve always used voices in my work so when I came across this mobile phone scanner device, which was about five years ago, it was just like another way to access voices. But less self-consciously, insofar as I wasn t sticking a microphone under someone s nose and going say something for my tape please .
I never thought of releasing the stuff until I did a few tapes and circulated them amongst friends, and one of em said oh, we could release this and put it out as a CD. And it just grew quite subtly from there.
Having spent so many man-hours listening in on the airwaves, Robin must have heard some unbelievable utterances in his time.
Sometimes the most banal ones are the best. I love those situations where you have a couple going I love you, I love you too and then putting down the phone. It s just nice, even when it s only these anonymous voices. It s actually quite reassuring for you as an individual to be privy to that!
A few times, I ve heard husbands ringing their wives and going Sorry love, I ll be home late from work and then straight away ringing up a prostitute. When I let other people listen in on this stuff with me, they re shocked that this is actually happening in real time. They re sitting there listening and they go (whispers) Can we speak? . They think it s like a microphone! It s essentially a radio receiver, but it s really a little window into another world.
Does he ever suffer attacks of conscience as regards the ethics of this kind of activity?
Of course I have a conscience about it, he says, and basically I m a moral person. If I wanted to, I could make a living from listening over the phone to people buying things with their credit cards, taking their numbers, and making a lot of money.
But I m just interested in raw information, voices in the ether. It s not like computer hacking I d feel bad if I wilfully tracked someone specific down to listen to them. When I edit stuff, I take out all the identification variables, like names, addresses and phone numbers.
One of the most accomplished tracks Scanner s
created in his whole career is Heidi , the composition which is arguably the centrepiece of his new album, Delivery. Over a haunting, edgy backdrop of stabbing strings and wailing arpeggios, a jilted lover pleads and begs his erstwhile partner (the Heidi of the title) to take him back, eventually turning more and more aggressive as the conversation progresses. By the end he s making Travis Bickle sound like Alan Titchmarsh ( Never, ever, ever fucking lie to me again, Heidi! ). The woman on the other end is not heard. I played it to a friend quite recently and, while impressed by the sheer emotional depth of it, she described it as painful .
I think that s an excellent comment, laughs Robin. The Heidi piece is a good example of some of those characters that exist out there. Somebody actually asked me what film it was taken from! They fail to realise that those people are out there, those clichid men like, he just wants to sleep with her, for God s sake, get his leg over, it s very simple. Nothing more to it. That kind of mentality is very terrifying.
I must say, I m very curious about that kind of narrative, where you can only hear one person. On Heidi , the woman is there, really faint, but I ve disguised it with all the background sound. And as for the bloke, he s an extraordinary character. The amazing lines he comes out with. It s weird the way he keeps repeating her name over and over again, like some strange mantra almost. Probably he s got no self-confidence. And she wasn t having any of it, that s what was so cool about it! The original actually goes on a lot longer than that, I can assure you. He s probably still ranting on now!
Musically, Delivery ranges from Kraftwerk-esque mechanisms to serene, dark pools of ambient which bring to mind Paul Sch|tze or the Aphex Twin s Selected Ambient Works Volume II. It s the residue of a massive record collection, as Robin explains.
I love everything from Massive Attack to Scorn, he enthuses. I also have this Ennio Morricone collection of soundtracks from Italian cult movies of the late 60s and early 70s. Absolutely amazing so, so good. I like some guitar stuff too The Swans are a band I ve stuck with for ages. Their last ever gig, in London recently, was the most phenomenal live show I ve seen for years. I like that kind of visceral impact.
Robin then asks me what kind of stuff I like, startling the hell out of me in the process.
I m just always curious about what other people listen to at home even heavy rock fans! I hate it when people say I like techno and that s it . I can t understand that sort of mentality. I mean, if you chose all your friends for the same reason, you d be a very dull person, wouldn t you?
At the moment, Robin s services are more in demand than a cure for cancer, with his filofax ready to burst at the seams due to the amount of phone numbers and collaboration offers contained within.
In a way, the Delivery album hints at the other stuff I m doing, he says, like these sound installations I mentioned earlier they re very quiet, experimental pieces. I ve been doing stuff for the BBC, soundtracks for plays and so on. They actually got me to do a sort of radio travelogue when I was going to Lithuania they knew I was going to the Baltics, and they were like, Take a little microphone with you and report on what happens over there and what it s like, and then when you get back, do a little travel report for us . So that was good fun. And I ve been commissioned to do something with the Kronos Quartet, who are this kind of avant garde modern classical music outfit, next year as well.
And Bryan Ferry rang me up can you believe it? he asks incredulously. We ve been collaborating on tracks for his new album. It was great, actually working with somebody who my mum s heard of (laughs), y know what I mean? He s just a nice bloke, a nice middle-aged man.
So anyway, I messed his music up, basically. I put loads of abstract noise over all these smooth, lounge-lizard type tracks with lyrics like I m going down to Alphaville .
Ultimately, though, with Delivery, Robin Rimbaud is anxious to prove that there s more to his work than just a few recorded telephone calls apart from Heidi , the tracks on the album use phone material merely as peripheral background noise, standing or falling (mostly standing) on the quality of the music.
The original of Delivery had about seven tracks with voices on them, he avers, but I wanted to show people I can write music. People said to me, Don t you feel that the gimmick s worn out now? , but it was never a gimmick if it was, it would ve faded out by this stage. We know all about gimmicks; we know about Babylon Zoo and White Town, and so on. And there s more to my stuff than just listening to people s voices. n

Delivery is out now on Earache.