thu 28/03/2024

Q&A Special: Composer Scanner | reviews, news & interviews

Q&A Special: Composer Scanner

Q&A Special: Composer Scanner

From morgues to chill-out zones, the sound sculptor now makes an aural forest

Over this weekend the spaces of London's Royal Opera House will be transformed by strange sounds, vaguely operatic, vaguely foresty, thoroughly chilled. The ambient atmospheres will be made by Scanner, who calls himself a “cultural engineer” and has made sounds for morgues, dances, Philips wake-up lights and chill-out rooms in clubs, during an extraordinarily eclectic career that seems to exist somewhere on the very edge of technology.

Scanner’s music studio is a laptop, an amplifier, a keyboard and five hard drives. His scores look like Rorschach blots of computer scribble or wildly exploding colour bars. Aka Robin Rimbaud, born 46 years ago, Scanner uses his email inbox and his phone as key compositional tools. One of the odder features of the weekend’s sound installation - to which there will be choreography and live music-making, curated by Joanna McGregor - is that some of his aural themes and materials will have been sent in by the public during the past fortnight. They have been woven in to what can be heard this weekend, though having been manipulated by Scanner’s fiendish software, they are unlikely to be easily recognisable.

Public participation is a feature of the weekend, gathered under the umbrella title of the Deloitte Ignite festival, which for the past three years has run as a pre-season taster intended to highlight the coming season in unusual ways to draw the attention of a less familiar audience. While there are formal-ish performances tonight, tomorrow and Sunday in various studios, the atmosphere Scanner wants to generate is something more freeform, as he told me on Wednesday, swiftly checking his email box to see what new sounds the public had sent in. He is compact, a non-drinking, non-smoking, non-TV-owning vegetarian, exceptionally healthy-looking for a man who spends all day with his computer, and it disconcerts me to hear that one of his big breaks came from writing music for drug-fuelled party-goers to wind down to in chill-out rooms. Another surprise is how he started - eavesdropping as a child on other people’s phone conversations for fun.

Watch Scanner's MTV video (YouTube):

ISMENE BROWN: They say you called yourself Scanner after your equipment.

SCANNER: It’s true. I started making work using found phone calls. When I was small we had a radio receiver at home and my mother told me if you wet to the far end you could pick up police calls, for instance. These devices were legitimately sold in places on Tottenham Court Road,  so you could pick up, for instance, pilots’ conversations back to earth. Hence that story about Greek tourists after 9/11 who were listening in to these conversations and got arrested for being terrorists. You could buy these in the West End - if you think of the FM Radio scale as 88-108, these go from 0 to 1,500, so you pick up everything from baby alarms, fire alarms, hospital paging systems, bus driver intercoms, all the way to the top of the scale where you could pick up satellite conversations. And in the middle of the scale you could pick up mobile phone conversations. I found these by chance and thought, here is a way to pick up this sound that’s all around of us. And I realised in retrospect it was about entering a space you could never ever enter normally. When you hear people talking on the phone now they’re conscious of being in public. So there’s a sense of theatre. But these were phone calls when originally people felt they were in privacy, and nobody else listening in. It also resonated with the issues of public and private - no need to go into that now.

So you were interested in the sound or the sense? Alan Bennett famously went around listening to people on buses.

And Harold Pinter too.

Was it the sound quality that attracted you or the meaning?

I think both. I work with electronic music which is essentially imagined sound synthetically produced, and it’s not about the body at all. So that was a way of bringing embodiment back into disembodied sound. And at the other end, I don’t deny, there was the voyeuristic quality of being almost in on something momentous... if you just listened in long enough.

Did you feel you wanted to join in or were you standing outside remotely using them?

When I was a teenager - you remember those home phones that you plugged in and you didn’t walk around with? You often got crossed lines. And if you pressed the two little buttons on top you could pick up another line. I used to do it lots when I was young, and listen in to neighbours - and I also used to record them. I have drawers full of tapes and I’ve been importing them, and I’ve found tapes from 1982 that I used to record from crossed lines on my little Walkman. Just because I could. That’s the interesting thing with technology; when I was 11 I remember my brother and I recording television programmes on an old battery-powered cassette recorder just because we could, and it was exciting.

When I was at school, I wrote in a careers lesson: I wish to escape the accretions of contemporary work life

I’m somebody with a very inquisitive mind, so I want to know everything about everyone. So if I discover a new choreographer I want to know everything they’ve done, from first to last. Same with film directors. I checked up on you, of course. There’s the ability today to find out more and more. It’s something I’ve argued more and more is that generally technology shows we’re very lazy people. If people can have something handed to them on a plate they will. In the past you went to a video store until you had cable TV. Now you have Spotify, and can choose any movie ever. So you choose an Antonioni movie, and then after 10 minutes you say, no, I don’t fancy this, I want to watch a Woody Allen. That’s the concept that will succeed. Why are people upset about downloads? I’d say, why not subscribe to a label, then pay to download as much as you want. After three months, when you downloaded everything you could, you’d start to become much more consistent, curate it, in a way.

Tell me about your first training - was it music?

 

No, I studied English literature, at Kingston Polytechnic. My father was a motorcycle journalist. When I was 16, you had to take careers lessons at school, ad fill out a form. And every week we’d have somebody like a policeman or a local councillor. And I wrote on my form, where it said, what do you want to do when you leave school? I wrote: I wish to escape the accretions of contemporary work life. Which is terribly pretentious, but it’s what I wrote. I was always clear that what I wanted to do was work for myself, and do a lot of different things in different ways.

When I was teenaged I did a lot of multitasking, making music, putting on concerts, playing in bands. So when I went to university I studied literature because I loved books and poetry, and it was about language, which I loved. A lot of experimental writing. And it was the only course in the UK that looked at contemporary fiction. Everyone else was always about American literature. But while doing that I was working on my ow projects, releasing records, even when I was at college. When I was 18 I wrote a film soundtrack that was at the London Film Festival, and the film won a prize. It was just me playing the piano and singing like a schoolboy in the local church, but it won a prize and gave me confidence.

You cite John Cage and Karl-Heinz Stockhausen as inspirations, so how did you come across them - both of them used words as sounds, of course.

Very interesting question. My music teacher at school, John Williams, had played with John Cage when he was 11 on a prepared piano. I had no idea about all of those people, I listened to everything from the Beach Boys to heavy rock at home. But we did have a cheap upright piano at home, and I remember my brother and I recorded us hammering on our piano with scissors and things inside the piano -again simply because we could. That was when John Cage entered my life.

Stockhausen was when I was 13 or 14. I lived in Southfields, Wimbledon, and I used to be travelling from the West End quite a lot after seeing concerts or meeting friends, and we had those seats that faced each other and your knees almost touched. And one day this man sitting opposite me was looking at this extraordinary score. He told me about it so I went to the library and took it out. So it’s funny how these figures enter your life through a strange door.

Your work is mostly recorded. Cage and Stockhausen wrote music that was deliberately played live. It had to be to get the accidentals, and the sonority of the space you were sitting in. And today most music is made to be played through earphones. You’ve grown up in that earphone era.

Sony_WalkmanGlad you mentioned that. I’ve always been interested in how we consume. When I was growing up there were no Walkmans. You couldn’t take music with you apart from in the car. I couldn’t afford a Walkman at the time but I did have a cheap cassette. Would it be 78 it was invented? 79 (the first Sony Walkman pictured left). I used to listen in my bedroom on headphones because I didn’t want to disturb my family. But actually now I dislike listening to music and walking around. I find it really disconcerting. I like the scenography around me that tells me where I am, what’s behind, what’s in front, that 360 degree effect. I hate that thing you find in trains with people around you with headphones, and in order to attract their attention to pass by you actually have to tap them on the shoulder.

So you grew up with headphones one, but somewhere you decided to become a musician. When you left uni?

Funny, when I left uni I knew I wanted to be making performances, working in collaborations. I was working with people like painters or poets, or with theatre companies, though I couldn’t make a living at it. It was all basically through friends or volunteering.

Thatcher’s Britain? 1984?

Yes, it was a strange time. Just after this thing, the Red Wedge tour, which was very popular in music. And it was an exciting period, actually, when there was a sense that as a student you were empowered. This is very different now when students mostly seem quite honestly not to give a damn about anything a lot of the time There was a sense of empowerment, that you could actually make something happen. I took a job in a music library near Hammersmith and Fulham for about five years, an interesting job where I could learn a lot of music and work irregular hours - the morning off, or days off the middle of the week so I could go out to exhibitions or concerts.

You learned to read music?

I’d done that when I was 11 or 12 already. But it’s increasingly invalid now - of no use whatsoever.

When did you call yourself Scanner?

1991 or 92. About 20 years ago.

You were declaring you were now a musician?

I was releasing music under other bands, but at that particular time in electronic music everybody had personalities that they adopted. It’s quite fun to adopt a name for a particular project.

Like a Twitter handle, a username.

Yes, exactly. But in music in the early 90s - while I wasn’t somebody who went to clubs a lot - clubs were really intriguing because there was a massive shift in the late 80s when the chill-out room was born in clubs, and suddenly there was a space where people who’d drunk too much or taken the wrong pills, or got exhausted, would go to collapse. And the DJs in these rooms played music you could never imagine being played in a club -  like Arvo Part or something. You’d think, this is so bewildering, but so strangely encouraging. And then I noticed people were playing my music in some of these environments.

Oh maaaan,' he says slurrily, grabbing his head, 'you're Scanner! Your music fucks my head up.

Yes, some of the sounds of yours I’ve heard is quite 3 o’clock-in-the-morning music... But is that where your lifelong dislike of drink and drugs came? It’s ironic that you know as much as anybody about making hallucinatory music, yet you must be cleaner than anybody on the earth.

I don’t know! I just have no interest in it. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I never took drugs, I’m a vegetarian. I mean, I went to clubs, and a lot of people were clearly off their heads, but it was an experience that suddenly opened up the ears and the minds. I had a great moment - I was in a club in Holborn in the toilets, and this man came up to me, and he couldn’t focus and his finger was pointing at my shirt but wavering around, and he said, very slurry, “Oh maaaan,” grabbing his head, “you’re... Scanner! Your music... fucks my head up.” That was just such a a great quote. I thought, what a pleasure it is! At least I’ve affected somebody in here! Bizarre.

Scanner_mainI mean, you make music and you have no idea how it’s perceived, what kind of audience, how somebody’s going to consume it, what kind of environment it’s going to be used in.  So I started playing on that. I started appearing on compilations that sold half a million copies, where I’d have tracks secretly, with no credits, on the end of the album after it seemed to have finished, these chill-out albums. Suddenly one of my tracks would appear, rumblings or found voices, and be really disturbing. I used to love doing those kind of moments: like, that’ll teach you a lesson, not to take drugs and listen to this type of music. They’re all sitting there all chilled-out and it’s all finished, then my track comes on, and the room starts to change.

After you got your first scanner, I read you then got a police scanner.

It’s the same thing basically. The hunt saboteurs had these scanners to tune to police wavelengths so as soon as they knew police knew where they were, they’d move somewhere else. I was a kind of victim of this myself once when I called a cab to take a package for me across London, and handed it over. Then another cab arrived for the package - I realised that somebody had used a radio scanner to poach the job. A lot of people were using these.

So you collect this fantastic amount of material. But how do you edit it? What triggers off in you the attraction to one bit of material rather than another?

It’s probably a bit like cooking. You are looking for colour and freshness, in a way. You find something that’s dark, or intriguing, or funny, or even tragic, in what you’re hearing, and you start to weave it into a soundscape. Or you’re looking for a female voice to fit into something you’re doing so you shuffle through them.

I had a badge made for me saying Robin Rimbaud/Scanner: Cultural Engineer

Talking about the soundscape you’re doing for the Covent Garden thing, you got little samples and wove them into Puccini or Strauss in your samples you sent to me. Is it like that? It’s weaving a piece of ribbon into a tapestry?

Yes, maybe it’s more like a Joseph Cornell collage sometimes. It’s collecting materials and seeing where they lead towards. For instance, at the moment I’m working on a soundscape for Amsterdam for a new railway from Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels. I’ve been following that line for three years and recording in villages all the way along the line of voices, accents and street names. And I now have this huge pot of material. Eventually I’ll produce a 60-minute collage of it to give away at the train line’s launch in December, and freely available on line.

For the opera house project I’ve been playing famous opera themes and then collaging them into it. Joanna McGregor was interested in the idea of forests, You probably know the Deloitte Ignite programme is to bring a new audience into the ROH but also to anticipate the programme about to happen. I thought it would be interesting to draw on that programme - La Traviata or whatever - and throw them into the forest of sound. I’ve designed the sound for eight separate spaces in the opera House, all independent but complementing each other.

I imagine one of the fun aspects of  winning new audiences who need to be led is using experimental methods on incredibly familiar old favourites, like Der Rosenkavalier or Tosca.

Yes, exactly. I started working on a project based around Bach with Peter Sellars almost 10 years ago, with Lorraine Hunt the singer, who then died of cancer, and the project was put on hold. This though led into some other projects, like Shobana Jeyasingh’s dance Faultline, for which I used a lot of Bach themes. So I became intrigued with the idea of taking themes that are very familiar and opening them out. I like the idea of triggering a memory and then quickly making the theme disappear.

That’s how memory works!

One of the pieces is going to be played out over the Piazza and I like the idea of the series of pieces that are just enough to trigger a memory and make you fill the rest in. I like the idea of cutting the voice out. It’s what in sociology they call Repaired Indexicality. I studied this at school and still remember the phrase. It’s like, someone says to you, ‘Would you like another...?” And you fill in “cup of tea”. I like to play with that idea in sound so you, the listener, “repair” the broken sentence. I have a badge made for me saying Robin Rimbaud/Scanner: cultural engineer. I repair things when they’re broken!

 

I like the idea of taking things apart and seeing where they can lead - like these opera themes, stripping them out, or just arranging them for piano and double bass and putting them at one-third speed, so they’re just achingly leading toward something you might recognise.

[We listen to a Bach tranformation he did for Shobana Jeyasingh] It's quite emotional, the effect.

That’s what’s important to me that it contains emotional element. Because a lot of electronic artificial music is very distant. It’s very difficult to have a bond with it. Particularly today with so much digital work around.

What software do you use?

Ableton Live. Live is a phenomenal piece of software developed in Germany about 10 years ago. I use it a lot. For instance, take this opera house project. This is the third Deloitte Ignite and part of it is they invite the public to send in things. Last year, which I had nothing to do with, they were asked to send in photos, and someone sent in pornographic pictures of their wife. But they were obliged to use everything, so they had to deal with that. Anyway this time, I got sent this phone conversation [it’s a bit of a cheeky conversation]. What does it have to do with forests? Well, I can put it through a filter on Live, so they can’t complain it isn’t in there! Just basically using a filter which changes the frequency. I enjoy things that may be badly recorded - I suppose it might be like people whose job is to look at photos of models and clean up every single pockmark. I can be as fussy as I like. Put something through filters to make it magical, or drop it down octaves, or move a bit of it down a couple of semitones. It’s quite musical. Then you can start layering on some other voices, and have these very drifting soundscapes. Which I can then merge into things I’m working on for the Opera House.

I was given a very elaborate text by this fellow for each space: “Traviata... in the room is a coffin... candles... late 19th-century... damp and depressing”. [He plays some suitably dank samples]. We have a Tosca room where he wanted it to be more like an Italian movie with a thuggish police chief and her tied to the chair.

And a typewriter tapping.... It’s ironic that many of the more interesting sounds in like are those made by human being some time ago, like typing, because they’re full of human error. But in computers, so quiet and so quick, it’s more of a flow. There are a lot of very idiosyncratic noises in life that have now gone, like the sound of putting a vinyl record on the gram, has so many preparatory noises kind of announcing the music that’s about to start.

Yes, that’s an interesting point you make that that archive of sounds has gone from our collective memory. Like the telephone ring no longer exists. I’ve been designing sounds for a new telephone, but the one sound they didn’t want was a telephone ringtone. So they have strange clicks or insect noises instead...

Philips_lampI think a lot about this, as I’ve been designing the sound for the Philips Wake-up Light - I’ve worked on two of them. This is the most complicated project you could imagine. It’s interesting to design a sound for millions of people to wake up to every single day and that won’t drive them crazy. How difficult is that? And work on a speaker to be embedded inside a tiny object, and sound expensive, and not be repetitive and boring.

What was the eventually acceptable noise?

My philosophy was nobody wants to wake up where they wake up. So I didn’t want a beep-beep-beep or cheesy ambient music. So I designed this forest of insect sounds so you think you’re in Africa. Or by the sea, or something. The first one was amazingly successful. Then they wanted to make a cut-down cheaper version. [He plays me soothing sounds reminiscent of waterfalls of marimbas. Then an “Africa” sound: which is a rousing alert of roars and drumming. Another that is like tubular bells.]

What I found intriguing about it was that it’s one thing making records and having no idea who your public is but knowing it moves in a certain direction because you’ve seen them at your concerts, or read yor reviews. But a wake-up lamp? Anybody could buy that.

Scanner_Garches_morgueI also designed the sound for a morgue at a hospital outside Paris [L'Hôpital Raymond Poincaré in Garches]. To design the sound for a place where people go to identify a dead relative or child or lover. It’s an extraordinary project. A friend of mine, Ettore Spalletti, designed the space, and told me, the one thing that’s missing is sound, and would I do that (pictured right, the Salle des Départs).

I seem to have found a career niche for creating “environments”. Or answering challenges with sound that can’t usually be obviously answered. I thrive on that, actually. But which can be very difficult. Because what would you want to hear in a space like this morgue? Nothing, seemed to me to be the answer. But I created a soundscape of birdsong and piano pieces, all kinds of things, and mould them together and have it only barely there, very very subtle.

It’s like a tension.

It’s there as an atmosphere. If it were switched off, you’d recognise it had been there. But it works very well because it takes something clinical away from the space.

Actually, you’re putting presence in, where there is absence. It’s a very powerful thing you’re doing. You’re not following a narrative or someone’s demands for another art, a composer’s or choreographers’ line. You are creating something you hope the imagination of unknown people will respond to.

I’ve worked a lot with Wayne McGregor - we’ve probably done a dozen pieces together in 10 years. I work with dance a lot and it’s interesting trying to project inside somebody’s head what they want to do. For instance next week I’m working in Antwerp with a choreographer who has no idea what he wants to do. So I’ve created a soundscape for him when all he told me was he really likes Mendelssohn. He has absolutely no idea what he wants. He’s starting choreographing tomorrow. [He plays a sample of fairly static, regularly pulsating ambient music.]

I can imagine that being appealing if you’re lying immobile, your pulse regular, your breathing slow, that back-to-the=womb is quite simulating. For dance I’d find that too placid. Dance thrives on irregularity, I would say.

[He plays me something louder & faster though still electronically entirely regular & digitally steady]. I’ve just made a jazz album actually, with an American jazzer, which will shock people, I think.  Four musicians and me doing the production and playing the keyboards.

Wayne said, I’ve a ballet opening tomorrow in Rome and I need a new soundtrack, can you make me something tonight? I said, Okay

Going back to low-tech, old-tech, when you listen to Casals playing in 1930s and groaning and panting when he plays Bach - all this has been smoothed out for half a century, like aural Photoshopping. You should see this new film Pianomania. The thing that I found fascinating was that this piano engineer was putting back into the instrument all the flaws and unpredictabilities that sound engineers have spent half a century removing.  So how do you use breath in your music? Some people say CDs are too clean, and they want vinyl. You are playing on the very edge of alienation.

Well, with this jazz project, I left in mistakes, I didn’t clean it all up. I wanted it to be “real”. In this software you can even have a plug-in that adds grit and distortion to make it sound more like vinyl, with crackles and things. So it sounds a bit more like an old record. I think it’s phenomenal, it’s like what you’re saying. There was that realisation that in some sense it’s destabilising, having that clarity. It can become so sterile that you lose a relationship with it.

Below, extract from Blindscape, a 2005 installation:


I can listen to five hours of Wagner, but if I had to listen to five hours of electronic music where I knew there was no breath in it  I think I would become depressed, by the absence of human intervention. I’m looking forward very much to hearing this on Friday, although from my point of view it seems the world is your oyster and you can pick at random on lmost everything, while Schubert and Bach would have had a lot to say about the internal logic that joined up one note to the next into a phrase. So what I’m trying to suss out is what makes you pick this sound or that and combine them. When you have everything and anything at command, how do you know what you really want of each ingredient?

Yeah, I wish I knew. But you get given limits. For instance, take this Deloitte project...  I have a commitment to use everything that’s sent me for this soundscape. I've used only half a dozen today but I know there are another 20 waiting for me.

How does your work develop? How do you find a new direction? Is the world of found sounds so fascinating that you can go on exploring just by getting better and better technology?

I think one element is risk that attracts me. For instance, to be asked by somebody in New York to do something with thes jazz musicians, I say, I’m intimidated, I can’t possibly be up to your standard playing, but I can offer this. It pushed me in a new direction of thinking. When I’m working on my own it’s just me deciding. But when I’m working with a choreographer or film director, it’s a call-and-response.  I love working in collaborations, because I have to adjust and respond to another person and what they’re saying.

What about when you’re creating for a space? After a morgue, what else?

Tate Modern, for instance. That was their first-ever sound commission. It was an idea to have a piece people could download off the website but also be experienced inside the space. Three or four years ago. It was inside the Turbine Hall. I’ve written so much work working in galleries with other artists. Like Douglas Gordon in 91 or 92, or Steve McQueen, the filmmaker. Tricky situation, because trying to make work where the gallery is actually showing visual work as well and there’s an audience you need to anticipate.

I’ve worked in the Hayward and other exhibition spaces, and there’s a consciousness of other works being around, which you have to take into consideration, but you don’t know what. Like at the weekend I’m going to Riga to do a live concert, and I said to them this week, look, I still don’t know what you’re after, what this event is, are we in a theatre/cinema/outdoors/a rock club? I need to prepare a context for the work I develop. It’s often very fast, and often in collaboration, but I do take these tasks on because they’re learning curves. The Deloitte Ignite project came about because I’ve worked with Joanna a lot before. She said, I have this theme of a forest but the one thing I don’t want is birdsong or insects - too easy. So I said, yes, fine, it could be a forest of voices, or a forest of mobile phones - nobody has sent that in though, I’m surprised at that - or even a crowd, I thought people would record crowds in a station. Nobody has yet.

Take me through your technology. What do you use? It’s quite small. Just your Mac basically.

Basically I’m a small mobile unit. Much of my time is spent elsewhere. I’m a visiting professor in France, in a cinema school, and I live in France near Lille half the year, so I need a very very portable studio. I have this mini-keyboard which plugs with USB into my laptop. It’s touch-sensitive, and they’re cheap - about £40 so it doesn’t matter if they get broken or lost.

Then you can add in all the rest with the computer. But this is all happening in two days.

Right. It’s the way I’ve always worked. Like Wayne last year told me, I’ve a ballet opening tomorrow in Rome and I don’t like the music written for me, and I need a new soundtrack, can you make me something tonight? I said, okay, I’ll get up early and write something. And he loved it. I’m somebody who can turn around and respond to commissions very quickly - I can read the circumstances responsively and make the work at that pace.

  • Joanna McGregor's Deloitte Ignite festival at the Royal Opera House starts tonight and continues with performances until Sunday. Tonight Earthrise: the Lying Down Concert, including performance by Joanna McGregor, Ex Cathedra and Illona Jantti; tomorrow Underwood, a No Nation music event including Talvin Singh and Radio Zumbido, and Sunday Monastery of Sound, with the Tashi Lhunpo Monks of Tibet chanting and playing bells and drums

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