"Scanner searches out sounds and allows them to make their democratic music. However personal or technical, emphatic or dull they may be."

With his work as Scanner, Robin Rimbaud implicates himself in processes of surveillance, engendering access to both technology and language and the power games of voyeurism.

Dubbed a "telephone terrorist," Rimbaud is a techno-data agitator whose scavenging of the electronic communicationshighways provides the raw materials for his aural collages of electronic music and "found" conversations. Musician, writer, media critic, a minimalist anti-hero, and host of the monthly digital club, the Electronic Lounge, at the ICA in London since 1994, he is currently at work on a variety of projects. In 1996 he completed a lecture/performance tour of Australia at the invitation of ANAT (Australian Network for Art & Technology). 1997 took him all around Europe and the USA, composing the soundtrack to the Delta ballet at the Paris Opera House, touring the USA with Dj Spooky and performing with 100 violinists alongside Laurie Anderson, closing with a South Bank Show profile on British television. 1998 brought sound work on Bryan Ferry’s new album, production work for the American "lounge musak" masters Combustible Edison, a Fellowship in Sound at John Moore’s University in Liverpool, collaborations with visual artist Mike Kelly and composer Charlemagne Palestine and most eventful a sound bus tour around London entitled Surface Noise at the invitation of Artangel.

1999 continues with a soundtrack commission, the Ways of Living, at the Metropolitan Museum in Korea, which Her Majesty the Queen will open in Seoul, Korea, The Shout, a collaboration with a 15 piece choir and BBC radio productions of Midsummer Nights Dream, Anne Michael’s Fugitive Pieces and an extended feature on poet Sylvia Plath.

His most recent release is possibly his most elegiac CD to date. Entitled Lauwarm Instrumentals, it is released on his own label, Sulphur.

“Scanner searches out sounds and allows them to make their democratic music. However personal or technical, emphatic or dull they may be in themselves, he weaves these fragments of communication into a rich tapestry of sound. He likes the easy transition from image to sound and back again: it encourages the collapse of legibility into texture, the distillation of sound into acoustic disturbance, ‘like wow and flutter, or the fluff on the end of a needle.’
—Financial Times

“He is very experimental because he is searching in a realm of sound which is not usually used for music...he has a good sense of atmosphere.”
—Karlheinz Stockhausen - BBC Radio 3