Rimbaud’s
never exactly sure whether to call himself a musician or an
artist, or what he is. “When I travel and people ask
me what I do, when I sit on an airplane, I always lie and say
I’m a hairdresser, because it’s easier than saying
I’m a musician. Because when I say I’m a musician
they always respond, ‘hey, what do you play,’ as
in which instrument. And I can’t really play anything
very well. If I say I’m an artist then they ask, ‘oh
what kind, do you paint, do you sculpt?’ You say you’re
a sound artist, they say, ‘what the hell’s a sound
artist?’ So hairdresser’s usually the simplest
answer.”
Often the prankster, Rimbaud jokes about his new musical
direction, “then
I thought I could do Scannerpunk, thrash metal versions of my music.” More
seriously, Rimbaud explains that with Wave of Light By Wave of Light he
just “wanted to make a record that was more optimistic, more like
a shiny pop record in a way; that on the surface level was very accessible,
but underneath there’s a lot of other stuff moving around.”
The pulse underneath “Cosy Veneer’s” surface is a picture
of “Lenny Kravitz in his tight leather trousers.” For several
songs on the new record Rimbaud utilized a computer program that turns
scanned images into sound by measuring the amount of pixels in a picture
and arbitrarily creating noise from it. “I thought, wouldn’t
it be great to sample on this record, but not to sample a Led Zeppelin
riff that everybody would recognize, but to sample an image and see how
that would suggest a kind of correlation. You don’t have to know
the Lenny Kravitz story to enjoy that piece of music,” Rimbaud explains
before humorously adding, “I toyed with the idea of doing a Jennifer
Lopez project, but that’s just an excuse to surf the web for Jennifer
Lopez pictures.”
Often the way Rimbaud presents his music is even more interesting
than the music itself. For example, earlier this year he performed
a series
of four shows in various countries where he provided a live spontaneous
sound track to Jean Luc Godard’s seminal 1960s sci-fi film Alphaville. “I
use the original dialogue and music and actually mix through it and underneath
it,” he says, explaining how it all went down. Sometimes he’d
even overdub all the sound so that all audience would get were the subtitles
and Scanner’s music.
Scanner also played an interesting show at an Italian beach. “You
know the kind of PA system where ordinarily they’d say, ‘would
the mother of a lost child please come and collect their child now?’” Rimbaud
relates, “I basically used that speaker system over 20 kilometers
of the beach, with people just lying in their bikinis all oiled up, floating
in the water, listening to my soundtrack.”
It’s not the first time Rimbaud has played to an oiled up audience
either. Rimbaud was playing what he thought was an ordinary Scanner set
at a public festival in Brazil when he got a surprise. “I was playing
in a circus tent and I thought, ‘this is unusual, I don’t wear
a clown’s red nose and those shoes, but lets give it a go and see
what happens,” Rimbaud explains. “I started playing my show
and out walked a body builder and another body builder, until about five
or six of the characters were standing there in their little loin clothes,
flexing their muscles, all greased up. And I could just not breath, I was
laughing so much and was so embarrassed at the same time. I took my camera
out and took loads of photos of them as well. It was just so totally surreal.
I didn’t strip my shirt off and join in, but it was such a brilliant
thing and I realized that when I’d been invited to make this piece,
they hadn’t made it clear that I was making a soundtrack to body
building.”
He had no clue he was to perform at a Brazilian body building contest. “It
was fine,” Rimbaud says, before sarcastically adding, “obviously
a lot of people work out to my music.”
Rimbaud’s tour-de-force, however, must be the night he played sixteen
separate concerts all in the same night, across the globe. No, it wasn’t
a case of astral projection. Rimbaud actually used look-alikes.
“I met somebody in London, and he was from Miami actually, and he said
he was down at the Miami music convention and had met people who’d come
up to him and said, ‘hey, when are you playing Scanner?’ And I realized
that the poor unfortunate soul looked like me. He told me this story and we kept
in contact so I conjured up this idea, ‘well he could play a show for me
in the states and I wouldn’t have to be there.
“Over a few months I came up with this idea. I had a record coming out,
it was my last record, Lauwarm Instrumentals, a couple of years ago. And what
I did was instead of making a launch party for it, I made CD-Rs for sixteen people
and I actually made these parties in sixteen countries simultaneously on a Wednesday
night. They weren’t paying parties, people just came along for free.
The CD would be played, somebody would be there and the most amazing thing
is that
two of the concerts were reviewed. People thought it was me, which I thought
was quite amusing. And even more amusing was that one of the participants was
a girl, in Austria, which I thought was brilliant. I was just kind of interested
in the idea of the kind of facelessness of electronica music and to see how
far you could take it.”
Rimbaud wasn’t even at any of the shows. “I had just moved
home and I was still at home decorating that night, so I couldn’t
play a concert.”
It doesn’t end there. Rimbaud’s composed the soundtrack to
a Parisian ballet, worked with an orchestra in Rome, lectured at various
universities, scored a documentary about the late British film director
Derek Jarman, connected the Gothenburg tram system with microphones, and
other strange and interesting artistic accomplishments too many to get
into here. But which is he most proud of? “None of them,” Rimbaud
admits, “I’m still trying, I still don’t feel content
with most of them. You know, I still endlessly see mistakes in them, as
you can imagine. Generally they’re okay, but I still don’t
think I’ve made any one work that I’d say, ‘that’s
it, I’m really happy with that.’ It just drives me to make
something better, hopefully.”
And we can’t wait to see what that something better is. |
