CD – Mind Travels Series

It’s not the first time Robin Rimbaud, also known under the alias Scanner, carries some musical collaborations outside of the usual borders, for example the most recent and a bit ambient “South London Original” with David Harrow, or the less recent projects with some pop artists as Radiohead and Bryan Ferry, or with musicians whose approach is more abstract and conceptual, as Laurie Anderson, Carsten Nicolai and Michael Nyman, not to mention his meeting with the video-art of Douglas Gordon, with the theater of Lenz Rifrazioni or with the dance of Merce Cunningham and the Royal Ballet, or his crossings with the art of Mike Kelley and the cinema of Derek Jarman. Overall, this is a huge list of electronics music lived very intensively, already from the beginning of nineties, or maybe, we should say “tour curt” art, since we might add to the former list the sound installations to the hospital Raymond Poincaré, the collaborations with the architecture studio Chance de Silva, virtual ballets, events at the MIT, compositions for the London Sinfonietta and the BBC Concert Orchestra. Scanner already made a work with the French artists Laurent Petitgand and Thierry Mérigout in 2020 with a release on Offen Music. This return proves a successful cross, now they remake one of the already edited pieces, the iconic “Gilles”, dedicated to Deleuze, with the vocal recordings of a philosopher, who somehow is another undirect witness of the electronics “thousand sounds”, what “oblique” and “ubiquitous” can get triggered in the music and being reflected in boundless streams. In OLA there are nine tracks, we move from the accentuated industrial tones of “BED” with mephistophelian and sacral vocals laid on repetitive beats and unhealthy drones – memories maybe of the past style of Mérigout – to the even more beat-orientated sequences of the title track, anyway definitely hypnotic and full of weird vocal additions, analog syntetizers and indie and nineties trip-hop quirks made more rarefied and elegiac in the form of rather ghostly dirges. Also, the closing track, “95” evokes a synthetic, martial, dense, and, if we want, a bit stylistically oscillating, like everything else. It seems a proliferation of trends out of any kind of “common sense”, a romanticism of the pure desire and at the same time insurgent anarchic spontaneism, modulated by an insisting emotional hammering and from the experiences of the experimenters, who had crossed several ages and startles.

 

Geins’t Naït + Scanner + Laurent Petitgand – OLA