REVIEW: Scanner, Lauwarm Instrumentals (Beggars Banquet/Sulfur)
- Andrew Duncan
Sound can be equally, if not more powerful, than any image leaving an uncontrolled environment for the mind to react.
Lauwarm Instrumentals is a vast soundscape that does just that. If any normal person had created the same collection of songs, they would probably be considered an inspiring individual, but for Robin Rimbaud's -- better known as Scanner -- credentials, he is simply tagged as a visionary rebel in the world of experimental electronic music.
What distinguishes Rimbaud from other electronic artists is that he is not just an experimentalist, but a composer with a reputation that resembles the like of John Cage or Phillip Glass. Just this year alone, he has worked with a 15-piece choir recording for the BBC radio production of "Midsummer Nights Dream," Anne Michael's "Fugitive Pieces" and an extended feature on poet Sylvia Plath. He can also mark his sound interpretation of Jean Cocteau's for the BBC right up there with the rest.
However, recording for the BBC is not all he is capable of, as the list of composing for the Paris Opera House to the Metropolitan Museum in Korea is equally awe-inspiring.
If that is not enough, he has also received a Fellowship in Sound at John Moore's University in Liverpool, has a B.A. in Modern Arts and is a writer for experimental literature among an expansive resume as a musician, writer and artist.
Taken what he knows about the classical world, and ripping it apart, Scanner is the end result in black and white (well, maybe duotone). But how does an album like Lauwarm Instrumentals fare to a country like the United States that is driven on radio-friendly dribble topping the music charts? Very well, thank you very much.
This six-song array of burgeoning rhythms, swooping around like Edgar Allen Poe's raven, filled with primitive tribalism and extreme electronic minimalism leaves much room for the mind to wander.
From the seven-minute layered droning of "passage de recherche" to the Opal-meets-gothic contemporary of "ground veil," Scanner manipulates the listener with a palette of early industrial, Krautrock, goth and mild fits of electronica ala Spaceman 3.
Summer may not have been the most appropriate time to release Lauwarm Instrumentals, but when the nights begin to cool and the long coat is taken out of the closet, people will soon be writing about Rimbaud as they do the early pioneers of modern music.
