On site in Vienna: July 22nd, 5 pm CEST, TONSPUR, MuseumsQuartier passage :: July 28th, 10 pm CEST, fluc. On air: OE1 Kunstradio: October 14th, 11pm (FM, SW, MW and on line at kunstradio.at).

Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner, who is an artist-in-residence at the MuseumsQuartier in Vienna, has created a new sound installation for TONSPUR, which will opened on July 22nd, 5 pm CEST, Museumsquartier passage: Klusterblock explores an idea of the ensemble voice. Traditional choirs use a series of voices to compliment each other in an elegant formation, but here you listen to the singular voice of the artist in a choral manner. Using breaths and pauses within the piece to echo around this open location, the work suggests a collision between physical space and the human voice.

Klusterblock, a playful amalgam of German/English, suggests the use of the voice as a wall of sound, leaving subtle traces of the human, embedding the walls with harmonies of an imaginary nature.

Scanner’s work with sound looks towards new possibilities of combining technologies and inventive ways of unfolding a musical narrative. It uses digital tools to try to offer back to the public engaging work of an emotional and imaginative nature and language, creating a momentary forgotten past in our digital future.

Scanner is also going to perform at the Fluc on Saturday, July 28th, 10 pm CEST.

While in Vienna he produced a new radioart piece for Kunstradio in 5.1 surround sound, which will be broadcast on October 14th on OE1:

Draussen / Drinnen — the new work — takes an improvisatory approach to a very simple idea – what exists between the outside and the inside?

Marked by a central point in the piece of a recording of a boys choir recorded in a Paris cathedral in the early 1930s, captured from the street, not inside the building itself, the work begins on the outside. Using local recordings of Vienna at the time of the recording session itself, spoken word, a walk through the snow in Lithuania at night, a boat ride in Stavanger, through the boys choir, the listener is absorbed into the ether, into a collective memory. The second half moves to the interior, using domestic recordings, movements through a building and closes as it begins, with a choral voice and a drum beat.

“My work explores the relationship between sound and architectural space and the semantic spaces between information, places, history and relationships, where one has to fill the gaps to complete the picture. It explores the hidden resonances and meanings within memory, in particular the subtle traces that people and their actions leave behind.”
(Scanner, July 2007)

Robin Rimbaud (born Robin Aspel in 1964 in Southfields, London) is an electronic musician who works under the name Scanner due to his use of cell phone and police scanners in live performance.

Rimbaud is also a writer and media critic, multi-media artist and record producer. He borrowed his stage name from the device he used in his early recordings, picking up indeterminate radio signals in the airwaves and using them as an instrument in his compositions.