Press coverage

The Wire, issue 186, August 1999

The Independent, 15 October 1998:
"Rimbaud's sound fixation has also graduated toward noises that surround us day to day but never reach our consciousness. He is set to relinquish his trademark scanning equipment in favour of a simple recorder and a digital camera for Surface Noise, a project commissioned by Artangel, an avant-garde collective. Rimbaud's contribution forms part of a giant undertaking called Inner City, consisting of nine commissions over the next two years and designed to explore conceptions of urban space. Other collaborators include John Berger and Laurie Anderson." (Fiona Sturges - read full article)

The Big Issue, 9 - 15 November 1998:
"Charitable art foundation Artangel has commissioned an illustrious group of writers and thinkers, including John Berger, Janet Cardiff, Michael Ondaatje and Richard Wentworth, to give expression to their ideas about issues affecting London at the turn of the millennium. The project is called Inner City and it will run over the next two years. The first commission is from Scanner, aka Robin Rimbaud, who has devised a map route from St Paul's to Big Ben using the sheet music for London Bridge Is Falling Down."

Evening Standard, 12 November 1998:
"Sonic magpie Scanner has been up to his high-tech tricks again. Last week he walked from St Paul's Cathedral to Big Ben armed with a digital camera and a DAT machine, recording sounds,images and snatches of conversation. For the next three evenings, you can climb aboard a double-decker bus and retrace the route, listening to the sound piece he's mixed out of the mass of digital information."

The Times, 17 November 1998:
"A half-finished car park developed an unexpected, ethereal beauty; the closed funfair beneath St Paul's looked curiously sinister, and the two vintage Citroens parked behind Waterloo station suggested a larger, more ordered narrative. It was fun trying to decipher which sounds had been born of which pictures - was that noise like someone hitting the bottom of a plastic dustbin really a response to the visual stimulus of the Houses of Parliament? Above all it was interesting, if a little Truman Showesque, to make the step from seeing film as real life to seeing real life as film." (Hettie Judah)

Popular Musicology Online, issue 1, 2009:
"In 1998 Rimbaud created an ‘alternative film soundtrack’ of London. Titled Surface Noise, the work was performed over three nights on a double-decker bus travelling between London landmarks Westminster Palace and St. Paul’s Cathedral. The once-off project was commissioned by UK arts funding body Artangel and exemplifies the type of site-specific work discussed by To-op (2005), explicitly linking Rimbaud’s work with that of John Cage. Throughout his writings and interviews Rimbaud cites Cage as a key influence and claims that Surface Noise employs a ‘Cagean’ approach to creativity (2001). In doing so Rimbaud appears to be evidencing the narratives relating to the adoption of experimental and avant-garde musics within Electronica." (David Carter - read full article)

The Wire, issue 186, August 1999:
"Over the coming year, various Scanner-curated intrusions on public spaces are due, with less of the voyeurism of old and more of an altruistic bent. Commissions are coming in from 'straight' organisations and corporations, that nevertheless allow Robin to exercise his peculiar talent for cracking open the shell of consensus reality. One of them, Surface Noise has already taken place: a surreal bus route that cruised London's backstreets late last year.
[...]
"Surface Noise was an invitation to work with the city," Robin explains. "I chose two points of sound significance: Big Ben and St Paul's Cathedral. Big Ben as a point of regulated, formal sound that - particularly if you're English - regulates our news at night. But it's also something that is striking every 15 minutes. It's about a metre, a rhythm. St Paul's was more about a spatial quality, a spiritual peace, but it also has the Whispering Gallery, where 50 metres across from a friend you can go "pssst" and they can hear you. I like that idea: the tone striking through London, and the whispering sound."" (Rob Young)