Welcome to the Sound On Sound podcast about electronic music and all things synth. In this episode, we feature Robin Rambo, otherwise known as Scanner. But instead of interviewing him, we've handed over the entire show. Let Robin take you on an autobiographical sonic journey of exploration and performance as he talks about life beyond the computer screen and embraces modular and tabletop synth hardware. 

Hello, my name is Robin Rambo and I've been making music for around. 25 years professionally.  And I thought in this podcast, I try and explain how my shiny modern computer rather got left to the wayside in recent years. And  well, really how I ended up where I am today and what led me to using the tools that I actually use to make music. 

And so this program is a little bit of an exploration.  Of who I am and where I am. 

I suppose in many ways it's been the technology itself that took me down this route. Let me try and explain that in a little more detail. So time for a minor personal history lesson. If you will excuse me. 

I've been recording since I was about 10 or 11 years old.  So sound has always taken a key role in my life and production itself. But don't worry, I wasn't a child genius or anything. It's just that we had a cheap 1970s tape recorder at home when I was a kid. And I used to record TV shows like Spider Man on it so I could listen to them later on.

Pretty much before VHS recorders had yet to be invented, so it was my only way of kind of storing these memories.  It's Spider Man in his own tale called To Catch a Spider. Then I realised I could record our birthdays, our holidays. Christmas time, trips on the school bus and so on. Cosmos holidays and the crew, welcome you on BAC 111, which is under the command of Captain White. 

And rather like the way people use their smartphones today to photograph everything, all the time, so the tape recorder offered me a way to record the world around me, without any ambitions of using it in any other way actually. Just because it was there. It was accessible and it was fun to do. 

And I doubt very much whether many of the people documenting every droll moment of their lives would necessarily photograph it, were it not for the fact that it's simply accessible and possible. Everything's at hand.  I suppose what's curious today is that I actually still have these very cassette tapes. 

Boxes and boxes of them have followed me around flats until this day.  I have 90 minutes of my argument about biscuits with my brother  and ambient recordings of our dinners and football matches on TV.  When it comes to a free kick, it's a bloody corner.  Today free kick,  it's a bloody corner. Oh, he's a brunny, you all. 

Boom on your flash. Get it in the net.  Well, here we go.  Automatic tape stop. Automatic 

level control. 

At the same time, when I was 11 years old, I had a remarkable music teacher at school who played us the prepared piano works of John Cage, which completely blew my tiny little mind.  My ears were accustomed to Glam Rock and the Rupert the Bear soundtrack, so this was something that was so otherworldly and experimental, yet magical and unforgettable. 

I hurried home from school and began to hammer away on the cheap, upright rented piano we had in the living room, opening up the front of it and giggling as my brother and I discovered all the funny and quirky sounds you could create without pressing any of the piano keys. 

This was rapidly followed up by a chance encounter on the London Tube with my next door neighbour when I was about 14 years old. Don't worry, I'm not going to drag you year by year through my life. These are just small moments to give you some kind of context. Now,  my neighbor was a conductor, and had these incredible visual scores open across his lap.

And the curious soul that I was, I asked him what they were.  He told me they were made by a German fellow called Stockhausen.  And as he turned the score around, I was transfixed by the shapes, the colors, and the wholly alien notes on the manuscript. Clearly offering up strange sonic possibilities,  even without hearing a single note of Stockhausen, I was immediately fascinated. 

Now live music has always played such a key role in my life, and I began attending concerts at an early age.  Mixing up seeing progressive rock bands and noise artists with the avant garde seemed to be the flavour of the day for me.  One evening I might be at a destructive performance by German band Einstürzende Neubauten, the next, Enjoying a John Cage score to a ballet by the choreographer Merce Cunningham. 

And here's where it became really intriguing for me. In fact, it's something that directly pulled me back away from the computer in recent years, and in a very different direction. 

The fellow performing this Cage music was American pianist David Tudor.  And he could be seen at the performances, very neatly attired, as always, in black suit and tie. Stood before a table of strange boxes, cables, and obscure devices. 

I never had a clue as to what these actually were, but the sonic world they presented to me was truly remarkable. 

And in fact, Tudor has remained a constant source of inspiration for me over the years.  As a pianist, he championed the work of many leading avant garde composers of the 20th century, and had a very close association with Cage, another constant throughout my life.  When I was a teenager, I was fortunate enough to attend a talk with Tudor and Cage in conversation at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, which in itself I realise now was quite a challenge.

Cage was a talkative, playful character, ever willing to explore ideas and concepts with others, whilst Tudor was a man of very few words.  As usual, I took my portable tape recorder with me to record the event. But in playing it back later, I discovered that the recording was essentially silent, as with so little amplification, the tiny microphone couldn't pick up their voices. 

I now find this even more ironic given that Cage had offered us his controversial silent work, 4 minutes 33.  So my search for these strange box instruments began,  but actually took shape about 12 years ago when I was working in Virginia in the US, and I saw my first modular synths. I'd owned and played fairly standard synthesizers until that point in time. 

But not until I visited the studio of my good American friend, sound artist Stephen Vitiello, had I seen something like these. 

It was completely new to me, but the aesthetic aspect immediately appealed, just the sheer look of the instruments, and especially the absence of a screen, and instead this chaotic jumble of cables in the deep, deep unknown.  My first thought actually on seeing the modular synths was that finally I can own something like 

And in a few short years, it's led to both a generously substantial modular system that offers me all manner of wild sonic possibilities.  And in recent years, a collection of instruments with names as wild as their sound. I mean, how about the Seat Lombard Coco Qantas II?  Or the Maccombista Benjolin?  Or the Laurie Mill Double Knot? 

And here's where I struggle. Or the Mosrodtonia,  the Moro...  Morostonium gracla. Yes, it's still difficult. They all sound more like the names of items you'd find in a museum of zoology than a music studio, but I love them all. 

So, here I am in the studio, in  a slightly squeaky chair. I'm not sure if you can pick this up if I... Move around? Probably not. But I thought it might be interesting to just have a play. Live to tape, so to speak. As if this really was tape. Of course, it's a computer.  We're trying to avoid computers here, aren't we?

So,  I have in front of me the Seat Lombard Coco Quantus II,  which is a handsome wooden instrument, which has...  Colors on it that look a little bit like a breakfast cereal. You know, it's one of those Instruments that's looked tasty enough to eat  And next to this I have the laurier mill double knot, which is a handsome blue  Instrument i'm not quite sure what to say tabletop  Next to that is the keyed moss stone, which, let's say, to put it bluntly, this is a synthesizer, the keyed moss stone, and the double notch is more like a drum machine, more percussive.

And I can control this with an amazing wooden instrument,  which is a kind of wooden case with a silver...  instrument in the middle of it, which has all these buttons.  And you can hear me press the buttons here.  And I can press the buttons and  take the sounds away. And it's called Gesture Arcade. It's made by, uh, Meng Qi, a Chinese, uh, musician and designer who makes the most extraordinarily beautiful instruments.

So I control the double knots with this by pressing the buttons. And on the other side of me, I have this green box, which looks like a,  the kind of thing you'd have in a Mission Impossible film. It's the Maccombista Benjalin.  And this is almost like a chaos machine. So I'm not quite sure what's going to happen here.

Let me introduce the things one by one. So here we have the Keyed Moss Stone.  So I'm just going to play a tone. And I'm going to sample this into the Coco Quantus. And this allows me just to produce kind of tones and melodies. And I can patch it into itself because it uses banana cables. So,  this is sampled into a loop.

You can hear it. I changed the pitch.  And let's now bring in the...  double knot  percussion.  So here this comes.  And this is running through  an Eventide H9 pedal to give this kind of small echo to it. It should sound great in stereo for you. Let's bring  the levels up a bit. 

I'm not quite sure where this is really going to go to.  And,  on the Double Knot, it has these little buttons  on the front, and I can move between different pitches, so you see what I mean. 

This should change the pitch.  Kind of hard to hear with the small tone underneath it.  Let's record something else into it.  So 

I'm going to then drop the pitch down on the Cocoa Qantas. 

These two are running along quite interestingly. 

Let's try the  Benjolin and see what that brings in, in terms of chaos again. 

And I can change the  envelopes on the double knot so I can make the sounds a bit tighter. You can open them 

out a bit, 

so now you can hear them coming through  much stronger.  So now when I change the pitch, you  can  definitely hear this. 

Sounded a bit like a science fiction film, a bit of Star Wars  R2  D2. 

And let's  play with the pitch a bit here.  And the 

little abstract sounds coming through are the benjolin here. That are 

really talking to you. 

This is literally  how I lose hours.  Hours and hours of my time, just literally playing.  Sometimes towards something,  sometimes  just playing. 

And I really think that play and the sort of the essence of play is something that's so crucial to how we enjoy our lives.  Some may play golf,  some may go and play tennis or football, and I sit here and  twist strange knobs on instruments.  See where they lead me to. 

Let's bring a bit more chaos into the Seat Lombard with the patch cables.  And it will start to go a bit crazy, I think.  But you can hear it already. 

It's the tactile nature of these instruments for me that makes them so  beautiful to play with, and quite hypnotic. 

I can start to remove notes now from the double knot, which is the percussion,  by pressing the buttons. And  you hear they will start to  be less frequent.  And 

we're just left with the  Cocoa Qantas  playing this low pitch, and then  we have the  Benjolin  and some very strange things here. 

One can't always control them, and that's part of the beauty.  Let's 

take away  the Cocoa Qantas and just have the Benjolin at the end. 

And that's it, really.  A little bit of experimenting, a little bit of playtime, and seeing where it leads to. 

Companies like Make Noise created the MorphaGene.  This module is described by the makers as a next generation tape and micro sound music module that uses reels, splices, and genes to create new sounds from those that already exist.  It is informed by the world of music concrete.  Where speed and direction variations were combined with creative tape splicing to pioneer new sounds.

And microsound, where computers allow for sound to be divided into pieces smaller than one tenth of a second. And manipulated like subatomic particles uses real that uses real, that uses real, that uses real, that uses real  world of music. World. World of world of where Speed and direction. Correct.

Variation, speed, direction ones  that, that, that, that you. Pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew. 

Variation variations were combined with creative,  combined with 

one be divided into pieces. 

Of course, I was especially drawn to the fact that connects me back to my interest in music concrete and the work of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, who essentially gave birth to a new studio dedicated to electro acoustic music in France. The technologies at hand for them were rudimentary to our contemporary standards, but light years ahead of others at the time. 

They had a three track tape recorder  and a machine with ten playback heads to replay tape loops and echo.  Which was called the Morphophone. Hmm, does that sound familiar?  And a keyboard controlled machine to replay tape loops at 24 preset speeds. 

Suddenly, music could be understood as a sequence of sound objects. Anything could be recorded. A door slamming. A car passing. A train whistle.  All could become a sound object and made into music, or sound art, or whatever term we want to call it. 

Now, back to where I started, playing with tape recorders.  In fact, my sound world really changed when I was 16 years old, and my English teacher at school gave me his TEAC reel to reel recorder.  Now, instead of sound being linear, as it was on my portable tape recorder, with one sound following another, They can now all run together, alongside each other.

Or, I could just build up layers of sound. Build up layers of sound. Build up layers of  sound.  Build up layers of sound. With one sound following another, they can now all run together.  Curiously, the machine had an issue with the tape heads aligning.  Then again, perhaps that's why my teacher disposed of it.

But I embraced this challenge. Since I now couldn't add sounds in time, or melodically as the timing was all out, I instead created more abstract tape works.  In fact, one of my favourite things to do was to create one huge tape loop across my bedroom, hang the microphone out of the window and hit record. 

Thankfully my family lived on a quiet street, so every so often somebody would cycle past, or a pedestrian would pass by, or a plane fly overhead.  And these were all added one by one to the tape loop,  which would then take some time to repeat, and then these sounds would build up over hours and hours, and then I'd erase the tapes at the end of the day. 

Interestingly, most recently I made a performance online with a popular German blogger called Heinbach.  He suggested we make a live performance together, but given the latency of online audio, I thought it would be impossible to make anything rhythmic. But that also got me thinking.  Why don't we do something far more wild and exploratory and reflects our interests? 

So, I suggested that we have a dinner together. Something that we would ordinarily do, but in our socially distanced current times, just impossible. As such, he would remain in Berlin and me in the UK.  And we ate our dinner and amplified it. That's to say, he wore sensors that translated his movements to his modular synth. 

So when he picked up his beer, it would play a melody.  His dinner table was entirely amplified, and running through an even tied effects unit. 

For myself, I used contact microphones on my knife and fork,  as well as a hydrophone in my fizzy drink, and created loops with a foot pedal.  As such, our entire dinner became a witty and playful music concrete performance.  I was delighted that the audience tuned in live and subsequently afterwards on YouTube embraced this so positively.

There's actually even a making of video to explain exactly what happened if you search for it online. 

Like many musicians today, I've spent so many years in front of screens rather than actual instruments. And I've happily embraced anything that took me away from that world within a frame. 

And so here I am today, recording this podcast, into a computer, and looking at the audio on a screen,  as if nothing changes in some ways.  And yet at the same time, I'm aware of all the possibilities around me.  It's the challenge of learning these systems and discovering what's new and what's possible. And it's never too late just to keep learning. 

And in many ways we're going in a loop here going in a loop here going in a loop here going in a loop here going in  a loop here 

going in a loop here going  in a loop here going in a loop here going in a loop here going in a loop here going in a loop here going in a loop here going in a loop here going in a loop here going in a loop here going in a loop here going in a loop here going in a loop here going in a loop here 

I discovered recently, digitising all my old cassettes some of which you've heard throughout this podcast that In many ways, my work hasn't really changed. I've used the sounds around me. I've used the technologies at hand to create the work. And most of all, I've looked towards a future that just finds new opportunities to make sound and share it with other people. 

So, thanks for listening. And I hope my stories have offered some form of inspiration, or colour, or character, or just entertained you for a few minutes.  So, happy listening. 

Thanks. Thank you for listening. And be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode, where you'll find further information, along with web links and details of all the other episodes.  And just before you go, let me point you to the soundonsound. com forward slash podcasts website page, where you can explore what's playing on our other channels.