Hello
It’s May already, and my very special birthday month, when I share a significant celebration, my ‘diamond jubilee’ as it’s known. Watch the press for the celebrity celebrations, or not, let’s see!
For those fresh to this newsletter, I’ve been sending this out every month since 1996. It’s delivered on the first day of every month, and I’ve yet to ever miss a date. That’s 28 years of sharing information and stories. If you are ever interested in looking back through the old newsletters, you can find them here.
And every time I sit down to write this, I wonder if there’s really much to report, or not, and then discover things that I’d almost forgotten about myself. So, let’s backtrack for a moment.
I spent over a week down at Rockfield Studios in Monmouth, Wales in April. It was apparently the first residential recording studio in the world. The studios themselves are installed in converted solid-stone farm buildings, and pet sheep roam the land, waiting for attention. More than once, I walked out to find them joyfully running towards me for attention!
I was there to write new music with my old pals Colin Newman of Wire, and Malka Spigel and Max Franken of Minimal Compact. We realised that it’s now 20 years since we first recorded as Githead, and 10 years after our last album. We arrived with literally nothing prepared apart from a few lyrical ideas and so followed a similar pattern each day.
Into the studio mid-morning, play and improvise new ideas, have lunch, return to work all afternoon, eat a tasty healthy dinner at 18.30 cooked by our wonderful engineer Tim Lewis (aka electronic musician Thighpaulsandra), and then relax and to bed. Given my strict early morning rises and thus a need to get to bed early, we didn’t follow the excesses of previous occupants, who have included Oasis, Black Sabbath, Rush, The Stone Roses, Coldplay, Queen, Royal Blood and many more. The famous ‘Wonderwall’ was literally outside our studio!
And, perhaps because of that, by the end of the week, we sat down to review the recorded material, and discovered we had recorded 43 new works. We voted on which to continue working on in the future and which to abandon. Rather incredibly around 25 of these were strong enough in terms of structure and character to register as ‘complete’ songs, whilst there were at least another 15 or so that were encouraging starts towards something else.
And, before you ask me, I have no idea as to when anything will be at a ready enough stage to share with everyone, but believe me when I say, it’s arguably the most mature work we’ve produced.
Back home and it was time to finish the final mixes on the next release on Alltagsmusik, out on 5 July on CD and digital. This album is most definitely going to divide listeners, as I worked with a team of players who have worked with John Cale, Wayne Horvitz, Cab Calloway, Frank Zappa, Morphine and many more. It’s taken TEN years to mix and produce this album, so I hope the wait is worth it. More on that soon. Here’s a tiny coded clue.
Literally as I write this newsletter, I’m uploading another finished full-length album that my top-secret collaborator and I think will put listeners into a deep surreal dream state. Again, I’m very excited about this production.
I was surprised to find a feature on me in the latest edition of Future Music magazine last month. There’s no need to go shopping for a copy though, as the entire feature can be read online here at Music Radar. It’s an unusual interview too, as I’m mostly offering advice to others regarding how to produce music, rather than speaking about my own career. Read it in full here.
I also wanted to share this truly amazing review of Alchemeia (2024), my album that explores influences from the music of electronic sound libraries from the 1960s and 70s.Here is just a tiny excerpt. Read the full piece at Igloo.
“In the 7th century Egypt was overtaken by a new force on the historical scene, the Arabs. They added the prefix ‘al-‘ to the word Khemi to create al-Khemia—again the Black Land, fertile with the accumulated dirt washed up over the ground during the annual flooding of the Nile.
In one way, Scanner’s Alchemeia album could be described as crude. He even does so himself on the album notes, saying it was “written as a tribute to the early 1960s library music culture, applying crude techniques of electronic composition,” yet here, for me, it conjures up ideas of crude oil, of the black fossil fuels living deep within the land, that only became that way due to the transformation of matter over vast aeons of time.
In the same way, using makeshift electronics and rudimentary tools, Scanner has taken the basic building blocks of electronic music and used them as his base metal to create musical gold.”
Like the workshop operators of the past, Scanner is fully at home in his laboratory, and more than able to assemble a unified whole of sound to work on spec and create what is needed, at the moment, for a production. Other parts sound like they may have been calcined and fused from spare parts and scraps left over from other assemblages. As such, he proves himself once again to be a remarkable alchemist of sound.”
I dug into my archives again last month and shared a TV feature from 1997, on UK show The Frame. It was filmed in Battersea, South London, and I used to live in that tall block of flats right behind me in the film. It’s also where all the earliest body of work of mine was recorded. Here I speak about surveillance, scanned phone calls, Stockhausen, Laurie Anderson and much more.
As regular as clockwork, the latest edition of my new radio show EarSpace for Slack City Radio is now online. Listen back online to this month’s episode where I present music dream music from Coil and Pan American, flickering rhythms from Autechre and Gabor Lazar, Californian sunshine from Suzanne Ciani & Jonathan Fotoussi, archival works from Terre Thaemlitz, Speedy J and Duet Emmo, and new music from Jlin, Evian Christ, Seabuckthorn, Alexandre Bazin and many more. Listen here.
And remember, you can listen back to every single episode broadcast in your own time here, in an ever developing archive of past, present and future electronic music.
May is going to be a busy month of travelling. It begins with a very special concert at LEV Festival in Gijón, Spain. On Sunday 5 May, I will be performing outdoors at Laguna Boreal, Jardín Botánico Atlántico, which is an amazing 25-acre garden showcasing plants from Spain’s north coast & Atlantic regions.
Visitors will listen to the music on headphones, and I have prepared some very special binaural recordings to be heard exclusively in this way, so it’s as if I will be whispering in your ear, amongst other sounds. The weather forecast is currently worryingly miserable, so here’s hoping it will cheer up in time!
Then I’m off to Malta for a week, home to sleep for a few hours, and off to the beautiful city of Ravenna in the Emilia-Romagna region of Northern Italy. I was there last year at the invitation of the Teatro delle Albe, to work at Malagola, their advanced artistic centre, to focus on the themes of voice and sound in the performing arts. It was such a success that I’m returning for another week to explore and inspire and make new friends!
Last year I joined an extraordinary lineage of visiting guests, from Alvin Curran, Meredith Monk, Joan La Barbara to work with young artists for three days in intense creative sessions. This has now increased to five days, so some challenging and productive sessions to follow I imagine.
And then it’s directly home to celebrate my birthday and it’s June already. Goodness me, the months are flying past!
All this travelling means that I will miss the opening of this rather expansive new exhibition at 180 Strand in London. I’m presenting a very special new limited art edition vinyl LP with scores recorded for my fine friend, the legendary designer and artist Ben Kelly.
Ben is best known for his interior design of the legendary nightclub, The Haçienda in Manchester, but he’s also worked with Virgil Abloh, The Sex Pistols, The V&A, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, Factory Records, 4AD, The Science Museum, The Design Council, The Natural History Museum, Gymbox and BIMM. Not bad, eh?
REVERB is a major multimedia exhibition exploring the intersection of art and sound. In the largest show of its kind, bringing together over 100 artists and musicians working across mediums including visual arts, music, film and live performance.
It will feature new site-specific audio-visual installations and sonic experiences, commissioned by The Vinyl Factory, from artists including Theaster Gates, Es Devlin, Julianknxx and Caterina Barbieri with UK premieres of artworks by Kahlil Joseph, Stan Douglas, Virgil Abloh and Cecilia Bengolea, and installations by Jeremy Deller, William Kentridge, Jenn Nkiru, Hito Steyerl, Carsten Nicolai and Gabriel Moses. And yes, my little record too. More on that next month, once I get the chance to see it myself!
Thanks to everyone for your support for the first two releases on Alltagsmusik too. CDs and special enamel badges and much more are all available exclusively here, and nowhere else.
As always and forever, thanks for your support.
Warmest wishes
Professor Scanner
::: listen :::
Vini Reilly: 35th Anniversary Edition (London)
Einstürzende Neubauten: Rampen (APM Alien Pop Music) (Potomak)
Laughing Hands: Complete Works (Mark)
Carl Oesterhelt: Eleven Pieces for Synthesizer (Umor-Rex)
::: read :::
Kate Molleson: Sound Within Sound (Faber)
Ben Murphy: Ears to the Ground (Velocity Press)
Keira M Cabanas: Off-Screen Cinema (Chicago Press)
Lodown Magazine: Sound
::: watch :::
Les cinq diables: Léa Mysius
Past Lives: Celine Song
Her Body: Natálie Císarovská
Close: Lukas Dhont
