SCANNER

How did you get started with your work in assembling the sounds you found around you, and what/who were your inspirations in doing so-
"I have always been interested in electronic and experimental music and have been recording for around 24 years, collecting and collating a vast range of environmental and field recordings. I was lucky to be introduced to the work of John Cage when I was around 11/12 years old at school and was given an old TEAC reel-to-reel tape recorder and began playing with tape manipulation, speeding things up and looping them. I began listening to quite avant garde music around the age of 14 - the most 'pop' related music was Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, Throbbing Gristle. I could once read piano music when I was 11 but that is long forgotten. I studied modern arts/literature at university so that in its own way has contributed to my work too. There is no family history of special creativity either so who can explain where it stems from!"

Given your work 'found' conversations on the airwaves, it's quite clear why you chose the name Scanner - but what else does the moniker mean to you-
"The name has an abstract futuristic quality I enjoy and the fact that it embraces the concept of scanning a city, an image, drawing in, vacuuming up sound and image appeals to me too. The chance to interpret and explore through a visionary manner."

Tell us who, exactly, Robin Rimbaud is and what is his agenda when it comes to exploring sound-
"Ummm... I often playfully call myself a 'flaneur electronique' (literally an electronic wanderer) or minimalist anti hero. I am fascinated by the spaces in between information and sound, the debris. I have attempted to take something relatively mundane and ordinary and in an almost alchemical manner transform it into something extraordinary."

Are airwaves, mobile phone conversations and other found sounds essentially a tapestry for you to work with, or do these things have a deeper meaning for you as an artist-
"There are both a texture to be woven into the bed of sound I produce but also carry an almost romantic idealism. Radio is a key element in our communications system and along with the railway system an essential element in the development of gateways across the globe. There is something appealing about these indiscriminate signals that float around all the time and one has merely to pull them down at a certain point into the soundscape and see what happens."

You've worked with both DJ Spooky and David Shea on two separate album releases of late - 'Free Chocolate Love' with Shea and 'The Quick & The Dead' with Spooky. How different was it working with both artists, and what did each bring to bear in terms of adding to your own work-
"Well for both it was an exchange of sounds as much as aesthetics. I have been good friends with both of these artists for a number of years. Shea and I have improvised with each other in shows in New York, Italy, Paris, Brussels and elsewhere and so the record was a good-natured tribute to a period of music that has influenced a lot of what we hear today - a kind of futuristic fantasm of exotica. With Spooky it was different. We each responded blind at times to soundscapes that the other produced. A lot more material than can be heard on 'The Quick & The Dead' has been produced which is likely to emerge on a subsequent release, possibly remixed. Rhythms were dissolved within textures, a melody scribbled across a back beat. It followed on in the nature of live collaborations we have established over the years.
"The ability to exchange and share ideas is crucial and these collaborations allow me and the collaborator to work as both negatives and positives of each other, recognising spaces within the soundfields and ideas of the other. It teaches the respect of space but also the relevance of context and extension of ones ideas to the other."

You also worked with composer Michael Ny Tags

• Scanner