Wonderful party last night, Scanner Q&A Part One - and Bandcamp Friday!

quiet details
Oct 3
6 min read

Hi friends - hope all good :)

Amazing session last night, thanks all for coming!

So good to see all the love for Robin’s incredible album, and also all the respect for the man - so many of you, like me, have been listening to his music for a long time, so it’s great to see him show no sign of slowing down!

As he said at the party, this is one of his most experimental albums, so it’s a mark of the artist to see his creativity going stronger than ever.

Thank you all for the support so far - as you undoubtedly know, it’s Bandcamp

Friday (much love to them!), andForces, Reactions, Deflectionsis currently the third bestselling release, any format/genre, on the entire platform - so grateful for your support!

CDs are moving fast and still available if you want, digital is still half-price.

Listen / buy here

Before we get into the first Part of the Q&A (Robin goes deep so it’s a great read!), just wanted to say a big thanks to one of our most vocal supporters - Neil Mason over at Moonbuilding

He’s very kindly made Forces, Reactions, Deflections album of the week and written a wonderful review, loads of kind words about the album and the label too.

Highly, highly recommend subscribing! Here are a few excerpts, read the whole thing below.

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Read it all here

OK, now the Q&A - enjoy!

Please tell us a bit about your background and history in music

Music was a constant in my household as I grew up, from the radio, vinyl LPs to cassettes. My brother and I would create radio shows for my mum, hiding behind the sofa and playing records and then poking our heads up to announce each tune. I can’t recall a time when music wasn’t playing, be it The Beatles or Gilbert O’Sullivan.

I would listen to music on the imposing but grand radiogram in the living room, or my nan’s old Dansette radio in the kitchen. I remember marvelling at the glowing red valves in the radiogram when it was switched on, which was a combination of a radio and record player in one. I was obsessed with the graphics across the radio screen, etched in a modernist design, picking out exotic locations that meant nothing to a little South London boy. Strasbourg, Hilversum, Brussels, Toulouse, what or where were they?

To this day, I still treasure some of the records from my childhood, with my name naively scrawled across the sleeves to confirm ownership! They are rather a bizarre collection, from Rupert the Bear and the Fire Bird, 1812 and other Famous Overtures and Telstar from Tornados. My music tastes were clearly eclectic from very early on!

Some of the records still resonate with me today. The Action Man is Here 7” was especially memorable for the B-Side of ‘authentic battle sounds’ which presented a series of explosions, machine gun shots and grenades. As the sleeve succinctly noted ‘the patrol radios for artillery support and land-based batteries and naval armour put down a 30 second concentration with the big stuff.’ Amazing! Interestingly, all these years later I can still today remember all the words to the ‘Official Action Man March’ on the A-Side. Goodness knows how many times I listened to that record at the time then!

More disturbing vibes came from Sparky’s Magic Piano, which presented the audio story of a little boy with an overactive imagination. The sound of the talking piano, generated by Sonovox, was generated by attaching small transducers to the performer’s throat to pick up voice sounds and transforming them. I recall finding the piano ‘voice’ really eerie, perhaps not helped by the humanisation of a static object, the piano itself. The imagination of a child is a very powerful thing indeed.

Now combine listening to Sparky’s Magic Piano with the Clangers TV series, which was a children’s programme using stop-motion animation and featuring tiny creatures that lived in space. Since space exploration was topical at the time of the show’s inception, the producers decided it would be set in outer-space, and the ‘Clanger’ originated from the sound made by the metal plates that covered the creatures’ burrows when they were opened. This was completely otherworldly to me.

I learnt to play the piano when I was about 10-12 years old, but lessons had to be stopped as my mum sadly couldn’t afford to pay for them (50p in a lesson). I was also fortunate to have had an amazing music teacher at secondary school who introduced to the works of John Cage and others at a super early age and opened up my mind enormously.

The cassette, in and of itself, was also incredibly important to me. It wasn’t just a format you used, but a philosophy—a tool for capturing the overlooked, distributing the uncommercial, and turning private signals into public art. Carrying a Walkman or a small recorder allowed me to capture the world in a pocket-sized format, creating a mobile sketchbook of sound. Recordings of intercepted conversations, urban ambience, and personal moments often carried this lo-fi imperfection and very early became part of my sonic aesthetic.I recorded everywhere, holidays, in school, on the Tube, crossed telephone calls, and whatever lay in between. More surprisingly, I’ve still got all these cassettes, numbered and in ordered, offering up sonic memories of my early teenage years onwards!

Indeed, those cassette experiments became the raw material for my first works and performances in the 1980s and later on my releases as Scanner. By playing back these recordings in live contexts, I could transform the cassette from a private listening device into a public art form. This leap — from capturing signals on cassette to broadcasting them in galleries, clubs, and records — effectively crystallised the Scanner identity.

Please can you describe a bit about your general philosophy and process as an artist?

At heart, it remains a story of constant discovery and revelation.

I believe the world is already absolutely filled with music. It murmurs through walls, across airwaves, in overheard fragments and the vibrations of buildings. My task is not to compose but to reveal, to bring hidden signals into focus.

Technology, for me, is never distant or cold. It is an extension of the ear, a lens that captures the fragile traces of human presence — a glitch, a hiss, a fleeting word between strangers.

I embrace imperfection, because life itself is imperfect. Every dropout, every interruption, carries memory within it. I thrive on the accidental, the unexpected, the collapse of technology almost.

Art should not live only in galleries or concert halls. It should spill into daily life: in stations, stairwells, elevators, streets. The ordinary is already extraordinary when reframed with attention. Hence my focus over the last 32+ years of creating work in all manner of locations and in collaboration with different artists, from architects to fashion designer, car manufacturers to ballet companies.

Collaboration is dialogue, and dialogue is growth. Boundaries between disciplines are made to be crossed, dissolved, ignored. Remember that the banal can often be quite profound. One just needs to listen differently.

To listen is to discover. To record is to remember. To share is to transform.

What does quiet details mean to you and how did you use that to approach this album?

I’ve always seen the label as a way for artists to perhaps take a minor side step from perhaps what they might ordinarily explore. I saw this as a chance to make a full-length album that explores in depth something almost imperceptive – the subtle, often unheard movements of a stainless-steel staircase in my home. I wasn’t interested in producing just a series of musical pieces that form a story but to focus on something unique and unusual, which would be presented in a most elegant manner.