Scanner, also known as Robin Rimbaud, is a London-based experimental musician who took the name of his act from the quasi-legal radio device. He appeared on an episode of The South Bank Show in 1997, showing off the gear he used to pick up cell phone conversations and other circumambient signals:

Essentially, I mean, what we’re seeing here is a big aerial. It’s the kind of thing where they say, “Size doesn’t matter,” and you know, maybe it does sometimes. And I use this handheld radio device, called a scanner, which is where I inspirationally took my name from, and what it is is a long-range radio receiver.

It’s like, at home, if you have a domestic radio that goes from 88 to like 106, I think it is, this goes from zero to 1,000, and it just speeds through the universe of sound out there. It starts at the bottom of the scale. Around zero to four are things like hearing aids, microwaves, and so on. And you move through taxi drivers, trains, hospital paging systems, army bases, and so on. You move through aeroplanes—and these devices are commercially sold, so you can park your car outside an airport and listen to the aeroplanes going overhead. So, make of that what you will.

 

 
Since then, Rimbaud has collaborated on records with DJ Spooky, Mike Kelley and Alva Noto, played guitar in Colin Newman’s band Githead, and scored a ballet based on The Chronicles of Narnia, among other things. Anna von Hausswolff’s Pomperipossa Records is releasing the excellent new album Fibolae, Scanner’s first studio album of the decade, on December 1. Below, see Maria von Hausswolff’s brand-new video for the track “Spirit Cluster,” which seems to be set in the same temporally distorted dimension as the clip for Cabaret Voltaire’s “I Want You.” The director says:

The video is set in a recently burnt down apartment: a mysterious and uncanny world where energy is stuck in a loop of repetition and rituals.

Watch it after the jump…