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Mass Observation (Expanded)

by Scanner

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No Thing Considered
No Thing Considered thumbnail
No Thing Considered I noticed there is a sample from Skinny Puppy's "Choralone" from their Rabies album in here, at least in the video edit. In any case, I dig this work. Thank you for the expanded versions! Favorite track: Mass Observation (Expanded Video Edit).
spaceprobe
spaceprobe thumbnail
spaceprobe Been listening to the original since the mid 90s. Used it as a soporific before going to sleep (when I wasn't using my own radio scanner). This re-imagining of the classic is all the more beautiful for its etherial quality and all the brilliant extra stuff added. Favorite track: Mass Observation (Expanded).
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about

From Scanner Aka Robin Rimbaud:

There were three performers and one witness. I can remember this day so well, even though it was some twenty-four years ago. Standing up before a mixing desk in a dark room in an apartment in South London, Jim O’Rourke, Robert Hampson and myself, literally all hands-on deck as we each took responsibility for the faders on the desk. Introducing sounds to the mix, unexpected, unpredictable, where the accident reigned supreme. Sometimes the high frequency of cellular noise would pervade the atmosphere, at other junctures it would erupt into words and melt down to radio hiss. Mike Harding from the Touch label stood silently, listening intently. A couple of years earlier we had set up Ash International, an audio project which allowed to release unusual and exploratory music and sounds that we felt deserved a wider audience, from Runaway Train to the early Scanner releases.

Two mixes were captured directly onto DAT tape. One of which would be officially released as Ash 1.7 Mass Observation, an EP that featured a 25 min version of one of these sessions, but until today the second longer expansive mix has never been heard. Each quite different from the other. Dehumanised communications, beatless, radio signals drawn in live to tape, and accompanied by dial tone pulses and abstract textures, Mass Observation is a highly suggestive picture of a particular place in a city at a very specific time. A form of Sound Polaroid as I tended to call such recordings.

This early body of work of mine, in the early and mid-1990s was a study in surveillance. Long before our concerns about data leakage at Facebook, and Siri spying on our private moments, I used the scanner device itself - a modestly sophisticated radio receiver - to explore the relationship between the public and private spheres, lending a deep sense of drama to these found cellular conversations within a contextual electronic score. In many ways, this work pre-empted our reality culture, as it exists today, with our TVs now saturated by Love Island and Big Brother.

In the experimental techno uprising of Britain in the mid-1990s this work proved controversial and memorable. Bjork sampled Mass Observation controversially for her Possibly Maybe single, whilst Coil and Aphex Twin bought radio scanners and introduced these found voices into their recordings, whilst I continued to create work in this grey area of ambient sound. It’s work that still carries great meaning for me, opening up possibilities with sound and introducing the human voice back into experimental electronic music.
credits

credits

released October 15, 2018

thanks to Jim O'Rourke and Robert Hampson
Mastered by Lawrence English
Released on CD by Room40

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Scanner London, UK

Robin Rimbaud - Scanner is an artist and composer working in London. Since 1991 he has been intensely active in sonic art, producing concerts, installations and recordings. His work has been presented throughout the United States, South America, Asia, Australia and Europe. ... more

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