NA: So Robin, you’re pretty much a full time sound artist... 

RR: I am, yes.

NA: I don’t think there’s many who do it full time...

RR: I find it remarkable, actually.

NA: Chris Watson, maybe?

RR: Chris Watson yes, because he’s also employed by doing...

NA: Megafamous David Attenborough work.

RR: Yes, I’ve been fortunate not to have to do that any more. When I went to university, I finished, I worked in a music library for five years working with the public every day and then I started getting projects together. And I thought if I can earn £250 a month it will pay my rent, I could stay where I was in London etc etc and I’d earned enough. And after a while I thought I could stop this, couldn’t I? So I stopped and since then I’ve never looked back.

It’s that risk and I always thought I could get another job.

And I go through months when I earn small money and then I earn quite well and it balances out over the years. So, something happened, I don’t know what. But also, I hugely diversify in what I do. So the thing I least do is play concerts or make records, it’s kind of the last thing I do. I make a living through things like scoring contemporary dance, I’ve written 65 pieces for dance companies and ballet.

I work a lot for radio, do commissions on the radio, lots of collaborations with film makers. And when you do things long enough it seems that people return to you – it may take ten years, it may take five years it might be in the last six months they come back to you and you work again and again on some things. And then it’s a bit like being a good plumber, or electrician, if you do good work people tend to return to you. They think “he was a good plumber, he fitted the pipes really efficiently. He wasn’t expensive, let’s work with him again”, so I’ve managed to maintain a flow

NA: On the musical side, how do you rate yourself? I’d rate myself as a naïve musician, I put my hands down on the keyboard and if it sounds good I record it, if not I don’t. And up from there there’s people who can actually sight read, so where would you rate yourself on that sort of scale?

RR: It’s funny in a way I’m an appalling traditional musician. But I can play melodies, I can write music, I wrote a big piece for the BBC Concert Orchestra last year so that’s for orchestral musicians playing proper instruments, not electronics.

What I like is that I can tidy everything up of course, I can tidy everything up in a computer. I learned to play the piano when I was around 11 or 12 , read music for a while, but haven’t read it since. I can read very, very slowly if I have to - but there has been no need to.

But I found what really helps is to find a voice. Like in music one of the most important things if you can find who you are - which isn’t always easy – then you’re able to do these things – you’re able to maintain it because people start to recognise you for who you are. You think of something like the guitar, you think how can you tell the difference between Eric Clapton , Robert Fripp, Jimmy Page, they’re all using the same instrument through an amplifier but you recognise this distinctive style.

You recognise it in production: Martin Hannett productions you can recognise as opposed to another producer. It’s quite remarkable, I find, how people do that. There’s a lot of chance involved, so I take a lot of risks with what I do as well, I play lots of risky kind of games in a sense - because I’m not sure what route I’m going to follow. So I’m quite open to collaborating with a risky outcome but if it’s publicly accessible to me that’s really welcome. So this week for example, is a good example, I arrived here with nothing on Monday, and now I present 20 –25 minutes of new work in situ by visiting these different locations and recording at them.
 

NA: So what you’re doing tonight is location recordings?

RR: We went to the lighthouse at the Lizard, we went to Goonhilly, so I got access to where the old satellite dishes are and everything – there’s not much stuff happens there. But you pick up the strangest kind of sounds at times. There’s this strange popping noise that comes out of the ground – it’s really quite eerie you don’t know what it is. It’s in this kind of vacant corner - like somebody’s trapped underground.

So I recorded all those kind of sounds and made loops and processed them. This isn’t a finished work, this is a work in progress so what you’re going to hear is Justin Wiggan for the first 20 minutes, then we do something together for 10 minutes or so then me for like another 15 or 20 minutes. It’s very much a kind of 'show and tell'.

Joanna Mayes, who you wrote to the other day, has been working with film and so she’s been filming in these spaces as well and processing them in a very kind of unique way not through labs or anything but through all kind of domestic chemicals

NA: Is it coffee on 16mm?

RR: Yes its all these kinds of things. Actually it’s quite kind of low budget but makes it quite exciting.
What I have is a computer, which is playing back Justin’s backing track. I have my samples…
And then I have a Digitakt sampler and a little Eurorack modular system I’ve put all samples in there, so I can process things live, I’ve got live radio signals coming in so I can pick up things live at this moment into the performance.

NA: So you’ve got a modular system there – about the size of a laptop that your take around with you

RR: It’s a nice portable system

NA: And you’ve got a little Macbook

RR: With samples on it from this week, and then an Elektron Digitakt sampler which I also put sounds on - lots of radio sounds and all kinds of things so I can just basically make pieces and I can improvise. And I can set sequences up live if I want it to become more sequenced. In this kind of environment you can’t anticipate who the audience is. It could be 30 elderly gents all sitting there who are not used to electronic music, it could be a mixture of young people and old – who knows? You have no idea who these people are.

NA: So it’s something you’ve never presented before, it’s what you’ve put together this week.

RR: It won’t be presented again, in this way. You know this work won’t be experienced in this way- so that’s what makes it kind of unique. I like these kind of risks and also learning – I discover a lot and I get to explore a country I was born in but I never actually get to experience this way.

NA: It must be really hard – There was a visitor centre at Goonhilly years ago but it’s closed.

RR: Yes, to have the opportunity to walk around that space quite freely and explore somewhere that feels a bit like an apocalyptic vision in a way, it’s kind of like a JG Ballard land. Which is a bit like the airfield we went to which you’re not meant to go to. But you’re not really stopped going to it. Getting to explore these kind of – it’s the wrong word perhaps - dystopian landscapes in this area of the country, it’s quite remarkable you may think you’re in Russia if you saw the photos or something. Or might be some small eastern European city that no ones lived in for years it’s fantastic to think – I’m just in Cornwall! And not that far away.

NA: The big thing at the moment is the D-Day thing. There’s practice sites all around here. You probably saw a lot of that and I think from where you’ve been in the Lizard there is that transatlantic cable which takes all the Internet traffic. So I suppose that has got to link in with your surveillance work?

RR: Yes, I think that’s what interests me. I’ve always been interested in an idea that all around us are radio waves, or are signals basically, and with the right equipment we can pull in those signals so whether its at one time mobile phone conversations or other times earth-to-satellite transmissions or in the most banal way, a bus driver, somebody on their walkie-talkie, somebody on a baby alarm, those kind of things. As we’re standing here talking to each other this whole space is drowning in these signals. So to be able to draw those down from the ether, pull them inside your work and then kind of manipulate them and use them like a tool to paint with and sculpt with, it’s fantastic, I think! You know, rather than to have to use a piano or guitar in a traditional way. I find that quite thrilling but what’s important it becomes a picture of that place and that moment. That’s what’s always been important for me, I’m not really an import, I don’t want to arrive and go “Hey! Here I am!” Which is why I’m not interested in gigs so much because it feels for me at least, it feels a bit fake almost. It feels not reflective of where I am

NA: So, what you’ve got on tonight isn’t really a gig. It’s more of a presentation of week’s research.

RR: Yes, and it’s difficult, people may judge it as performance, as a gig so you’ve got to be kind of conscious of that. But we’re going to introduce this – there’s a context at least - and it should be fun, I think, you know, it should be nice.

Justin does some great work, so I think the balance is going to be quite, quite strong. But again it kind of fits in with all the things I tend to do which are – I tend to say “yes” when I don’t know what the outcome will be.

Somebody says do you want to play a gig, it’s less interesting because I think I can do that quite easily. I’ve done lots and lots of shows, earned some money with it but actually it’s not about that - it’s about more than that. I want to feel like I’ve learned something, challenged myself and it introduces me to a whole new concept. So here it’s brought things together that wouldn’t have happened before I could just come down here, I could go anywhere with my equipment, set up and play. But I’ve done enough of that...and I tend to generally say “no” to those kind of opportunities in recent years.

NA: I really like the way you’re doing it – what I really liked was your tweet about actually getting paid for doing gigs…because that is just ridiculous what they expect of an artist.

RR: I’ve been fortunate to work with very big companies at times. You know I’ve done projects like for example some of the things I do people wouldn’t know. There’s a telephone made by Cisco, it’s a telephone that’s in almost every office, they have it here in the museum.

NA: I’ve got one on my desk at work .

RR: OK, so I’ve designed the new one, the brand new one. All the sound in it is mine, so when it rings it’s my ring tones when you press the button its my sound, the engaged. I did that. And I love doing work like that because you suddenly access a space you’d never otherwise access. It’s a huge challenge professionally to do, but I take it on because it just pushes me in a very different direction - but also I can make a living through that.

NA: What was the brief for doing a Cisco phone?

RR: It’s just, you receive an email that says “we’re interested in this, here’s our budget do you think you can work with this?” There’s always a NDA, you’re not allowed to talk about these things. And you work on it, and then they come back to you and they say “Ooh, it needs to be more professional, it can’t be too musical - it can’t be this - it can’t be that..” to be truthful people never know what they want until they’ve heard it.

NA: But you actually supply them with sounds and samples and things – and I guess, there’s electric cars now – electric cars don’t make a sound... so...

RR: A friend of mine does that, Richard Devine his job recently has been designing the sound of engines – imagining what an engine would sound like for an electric car, and doing that. I’ve designed car horns in America in the past - I designed car horns and the sound of doors. I worked with an engineer because the car was expensive - when the door closed they wanted the weight of the door to say “money”, basically to be expensive..

So I had to work with him to kind of look at the acoustics of it and see how the weight alone, would lend wealth to it. So, doing that kind of work, I find really rewarding because certainly it’s out in the world outside of a kind of idea of performance, or also ego. What I really like– it doesn’t depends on you. No-one even knows it’s you. That’s what I really enjoy, being quite invisible like that.

NA: Yes, I did some work for Sony, for Playstation, they just paid me off for the job, there’s no credit there or anything…

RR: Oh really? Yes sometimes I get credit, like when I worked with Philips they put my name on the side of the box. It’s a wake-up alarm clock so it says “Sound by Scanner” which I found really amusing – they suddenly thought “Hey, we can sell this to a whole new audience” – which in itself is quite amusing, I found actually, that Philips might think that was cool. Maybe it is cool for them, because usually they wouldn’t put those kind of credits on their objects.

NA: I guess it’s over 30 years you’ve been professional – since that first Ash International ..

RR: That was like ’91, ‘92, something like that, yes.

NA: So how do you think this situation has changed for that – I mean you’ve obviously steered your own course...

RR: It’s curious, isn’t it? I mean, the themes I was interested in that time what fascinates me is they’re so mundane and of the moment now. Our TV culture is what I was talking about then – which is quite amusing in a way – at the time you know it was like people didn’t want to listen to those things and there was a morality question. Yet people still listened because there’s the voyeuristic aspect.

Today our culture is saturated in this stuff, of course. To me its fascinating how in just 25 years or so something becomes normalised. I could point to MTV. Very early on had they videos of Lady Gaga. They’d blur out bits of her body. So she’d turn around and you couldn’t quite see her bottom, blurred out on the video. Today you don’t think twice about that – just semi-naked in a video, who cares? That’s acceptable.

And the kind of morality...things dissolve, generations pass, decades go by, barriers dissolve, some seem to reappear. It’s really interesting, the whole aspect of public and private, you know? The other week I saw a woman on a train talking to her daughter using Facetime. And the girl was sick. So I could see the girl in her room sitting on a bed talking to her mum saying “I don’t feel at all well”. It’s such a bizarre thing, really, really bizarre.

NA: What strikes me is people walk around talking to themselves. In ages gone by you’d think they’re possessed by something and now it’s - they’re looking at you and they’re talking and they’re not talking to you – it’s really bizarre – they’re sort of somewhere else.

RR: I can’t work it out. But it’s become the norm and that’s what’s curious about it, you know? Its really interesting to live at time time when things have changed so much. We were both making stuff before the internet was around so it was cassettes – it was a cassette culture we were dealing with. And it was very much one to one – you were doing it, everyone was doing it themselves, sending these things out, exchanging , no-one was getting rich by it, by any means, largely. But it was this wonderful exchange – and obviously the Internet has taken over that completely. And yet there’s still a sense of community with all this stuff going on – there’s still great groups of people and sound and music is still a great connecting point – a great nexus point.

NA: There’s fantastic sound and visual art mixtures going on at the moment that isn’t making any money, not getting any exposure...

RR: No, and there always will be, unfortunately you know. It’s quite funny how sometimes the avant garde gets absorbed into the mainstream. That can happen. And other times it just doesn’t. These poor figures just kind of sit on the edges. You get someone like Charles Ives, who was a celebrated classical composer – he was an insurance salesman his entire life: that’s what he did. And look at other figures. Francis Bacon was a furniture designer for years before he really gave it up to become an artist. Samuel Beckett was a Maths teacher at school and there were stories about him just staring out the window with these long silences… you think that’s really Samuel Beckett, isn’t it?

NA: And a cricketer, as well, wasn’t he?

RR: Yes, yes that’s what’s really interesting. And I think, you know, some of these figures are able to transgress, to actually move into a different field in a way. I’m quite lucky because the thing I’ve never been interested in is success in a way like big ego on stage, recognised in the street, making lots of money. I make a very decent living being completely invisible and kind of staying under the surface. But it continues to go on. That’s what I like. I make about, on an average year I make between fifty-five to sixty projects which sounds like a lot..

 

All photographs were taken in Helston Museum 7.6.19

http://scannerdot.com/

http://nigelayers.blogspot.com/

http://www.mayescreative.com/

also see Scanner on The South Bank Show 1997 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yfuat21E_dg