Hello
Another busy month here. So much seems to go on under the surface, that will eventually rise one day to distract, entertain or intrigue you, and yet for the time-being I need to keep quiet about. Time has also been intensely spent on migrating nearly 30 years of emails, notes, photographs and data from my old laptop to a new one.
I’ve also been playing shop this last month, just like many of us did as children. However, this time I actually posted packaged up real items and sent them to real people in the real world. And they paid real money. I signed hundreds of postcards, enclosed funny new ‘scanner’ stickers, and left to the responsibility of the mail services. And, so far, it seems as if they are happily arriving at homes around the globe.
Contrary Motion with Nurse with Wound
Contrary Motion, my new album with Steven Stapleton/Nurse with Wound, has taken up the most significant time, but thankfully also many back catalogue items at the Scanner Shop continue to prove to be popular. I always ensure I handwrite a postcard to every single buyer too. I’m an old-fashioned soul at heart.
I was also delighted to receive the original painting for the album cover of Contrary Motion this week. As a young boy, I had this wild dream of filling the walls of my future home with artwork from my friends and colleagues. And while it hasn’t quite turned out like I imagined, I still have some pretty incredible original pieces. This will join my other works from Duchamp, Basquiat and Rembrandt. Er, yes.
The Shortest Ever UK Tour
I just played a couple of extremely fun shows in Norwich and Ipswich, which were probably some of the most intimate performances I’ve engaged in for a long time. Indeed, the performance at The Holloway in Norwich, was so cosy that the audience was literally less than a metre away from me. It also meant that every click of a button and turn of a knob could be heard in the room, and every moment forensically examined! It led to this magical air of tension in the space and I loved it!
Watch this video filmed from the staircase to get an idea of how it looked and sounded.
Talking about ghosts and so much more
My installation work, Esprits de Paris, has just closed at Centre Pompidou, as the entire building is undergoing renovation and remedial work and will be closed for around five years. However, the artwork will be travelling elsewhere, so I’m just waiting for further information whilst it’s carefully dismantled and packaged up into an extremely luxurious container to travel to its next destination.
The work, created with American artist Mike Kelley, is a musical homage to the pioneering researchers of the Electronic Voice Phenomena: Friedrich Jürgenson, Konstantin Raudive, and Attila von Szalay. In December 2024, I was invited to present my work in conversation with Pompidou curators Nicolas Ballet and Marcella Lista. Not only do I talk about this particular work in detail, but also many other projects of mine over the years, presenting examples of pieces rarely heard or seen in public.
It’s a two-hour deep dive into the world of Scanner, and certainly recommend taking the time to explore many of the things we chat about in the conversation. Watch the entire presentation here.
Electronic Music of the Past, Present & Future
Your monthly dose of electronic music from the past, present and future, is once againready for you to enjoy on Slack City Radio. EarSpace Episode 21 brings you blasting, energetic music from Anmon and Skee Mask, pulsating minimalism from Alexandre Bazin and Loscil, and new music from Max Cooper, Doris Dana, Judith Hamann, Sarah Davachi, CoH & Midori Hirano and many, many more. It’s music for the brain and the hips equally.
I’m sure you know the drill by now, but point your listening machine towards Totallyradio and you can listen to this new episode, as well as the previous years too. Tune in here.
Playtime with Playtronica
There’s never enough playtime in the studio, but I had a morning recently where I finally had the chance to entertain myself, with the Playtron MIDI controller from Playtronica. It gives you the chance to play pretty much anything. Using alligator clips, you can connect up to 16 objects that can conduct electricity. You might well have seen videos of people playing plants or fruit for example online. However, if you use conductive copper tape you can also attach this to anything you like and still play them as if a musical instruments.
As a huge admirer of the work and writings of American composer John Cage, I thought it would be fun to combine some of my book collection with the definitive sound of his prepared piano, played live on the books themselves. It’s certainly not an impressive piece of music here, but goodness, what fun it is to physically play anything at hand!
Space Microscopy
I just finished scoring the soundtrack to a new film by Slovenian artist Ursula Berlot, who has remained a frequent collaborator over the years. Space Microscopy is a short film which will be presented at the Bunkier Gallery in Krakow, after which it can probably be viewed online. I will let you know once it’s available.
Interestingly, the work itself focuses on the visual and material properties of the two staircases in the building itself, combined with a scientific “penetrative gaze” of their material components (concrete, glass, wood, metal, plaster) with a scanning electron microscope (SEM), that produces perceptible visual images by scanning the surface of a sample with a focused beam of electrons. It’s deeply hypnotic and slightly hallucinogenic, especially with my woozy, out of focus soundtrack.
I’m playing a grand show in London at St James’s Piccadilly on 11 April, alongside my old friend Christian Fennesz. We’ve been friends since 1995, and I remember how I helped him out with one of his first releases on Syntactic Records from Vienna, for his 5 / 6 7” single, along with my other long-standing friend Colin Newman of Wire. To think that we all continue to connect with one another all these years later too.
I know that tickets have almost completely sold out for this night, but if you catch this message early enough, then you might be in luck. I’ll be playing lots of new music too. Search for tickets here.
Otherwise April remains a studio month with many commitments, and then I’m off to Amsterdam at the end for an award ceremony, but more on that next month, hopefully accompanied by some glamorous photographs.
Wishing you a lovely month ahead.
Warmest wishes
Professor Scanner
::: listen :::
Brian Eno: Aurum (Apple Music)
Coil: Born Again Pagans (Infinite Fog)
Soon: Actions Made Audible (Electronic Sound)
Natasha Barrett: Toxic Colour (Persistence of Sound)
::: read :::
Tod Lippy: The Esopus Reader (Esopus Books)
Katy Norris: Ithell Colquhoun Between Worlds (Tate)
Andre Breton: Magic Art (Fulgur Press)
Lars Fredrikson (Mousse Publishing)
::: watch :::
Lamb: Valdimar Jóhannsson
Mickey 17: Bong Joon Ho
Shadow of a Cloud: Radu Jude
Black Bag: Steven Soderbergh
