Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2013 | 12:04
wave of light by wave of light
sometimes when i think about the music i want to make, i think about scanner. his is a mix of experimental dance and sound installation art. that is part of what i want to do.
scanner derives his name from his use of police and cell phone scanners. he layers what he records from them into abstract electronic music, though as he progressed beats crept in until he recorded an album as scannerfunk. i've long sought his albums, but they're out of print and prohibitively expensive.
'the garden is full of metal' has recordings of filmmaker derek jarman talking about making movies. i've not seen any of them, but they're very arty and overtly gay. coil did the soundtrack for 'the angelic conversation' (featuring judy dench reading shakespeare sonnets) and contributed songs to jarman's last movie, blue (which is mostly a blue screen with some shadowy images along with music and dialogue, mostly jarman reflecting on his life as he died of hiv--the movie reflects his degenerated eyesight). amazon has a box set, glitterbox, i think, that collects his highest profile movies.
i discovered scanner through 'double articulation', a remix album of a tribute to philosopher gilles deleuze. some of his music sounds like the movie 'the conversation', with bits of decontextualized speech swaddled in tones and scratches. scanner eventually incorporated beats into his compositions and became something more like ambient house or downtempo music. he never had a real vocalist, though. no hope sandoval cameo or anything like that. for me, his music retains a certain dreamlike quality, at least in the remove from vocal sources. everything is open-ended and imprecise.
after 'double articulation' i picked up scanner's split with signs ov chaos, which includes a song from each titled "michael jackson". both use a sample from the jackson family cartoon fatboy slim would later incorporate into one of his first singles. signs ov chaos has harder dance beats, but otherwise their approach is similar. the confusing part is that earache released it. catalog # mosh 181.
