MusicRadar

Scanner: he's got a whole world of sound in his hands.

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Robin Rimbaud, AKA Scanner, is about as prolific as it's possible for one person to be. A pioneer of sampling, Robin made a name for himself by scanning the airways and intercepting mobile phone communications, then weaving the recorded results into his musical compositions.

Those early recordings put him on the musical and cultural map, and he's since gone on to extend his myriad tentacles into all manner of musical endeavours. He's always experimental and always busy, whether scoring contemporary dance, recording and producing with his band Githead, soundtracking films or collaborating with classical musicians. And even with all this on his plate, Robin still finds time to lecture at universities in the UK and France.

Such a prolific and pioneering master of manipulating recorded sound would clearly have many insights into the world of sampling past, present and future - which is precisely why we caught up with him at his East London base.

What's your history with sampling? We remember that you used to spin elements into your sets on three MiniDisc players…

"Sampling has always been part of my sound language. I began using cassette recorders as a kid. I'd record conversations on the school bus, the sound of peas defrosting, the fridge, the roar of a car engine… and then I'd collage them together into tape releases for friends. It was more a discovery about being able to store these moments and share them - and remember, this is before the days of digital technology and its ability to capture and stream almost anything in real time.

"When I went on holiday to Italy with some friends at the age of 18, I barely took any photos but I recorded my entire trip, from leaving home, travelling through the airport and checking in at the hotel to walking through the streets of Florence, all on cassette. This clearly had implications for many of my creative endeavours over the years.

"My sound world opened up when I was given a TEAC reel-to-reel tape recorder by my English teacher at school. Suddenly, instead of placing one sound after another on a tape and following a linear narrative, with each sound preceding the next, I could layer sounds and create combinations. I know this may sound trivial, but sometimes just the simplest of discoveries like this can alter a whole mode of thinking. It meant that I could combine different sound worlds together, from slowing down voices to creating tape loops of repeating motifs.

"Sampling the world around me became part of my language, the same way a playwright like Harold Pinter would sit in cafés and note down the conversations of people around him. Ambitiously, I saved up and bought an Akai S-1000, to this day one of the best-sounding machines I've ever used, with a whole one minute of recording time on floppy disc. At the time this was extraordinary, and I found ways to expand the sounds by slowing them down so that a half-second recording of a door creak could play out for 30 seconds once I had stretched it out.

"My recordings and live shows have always incorporated both composed MIDI instrumentation and samples of things around me - the real world as well as the invented and imagined electronic sounds

"Of course, the use of the radio scanner early on in my works - where I picked up these indiscriminate voices and conversations from the ether, like people chatting on their mobile phones - was a way to incorporate the very mundane and real world around me into my music, sampling it and then introducing it into the darker, more abstract sonic landscapes I was composing. It was also, I suppose, a way of humanising what was then often accused of being 'faceless techno bollocks'!"

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