Robin Rimbaud is an electronic musician who works under the name Scanner due to his use of cell phone and police scanners in live performance. He is also a member of the band Githead with Wire’s Colin Newman and Malka Spigel and Max Franken from Minimal Compact.

Scanner traverses the experimental terrain between sound and space, connecting a bewilderingly diverse array of genres. Since 1991 he has been intensely active in sonic art, producing concerts, installations, and recordings; the albums Mass Observation (1994), Delivery (1997), and An Ascent (2020) have been hailed by critics as innovative and inspirational works of contemporary electronic music.

Rimbaud began composing for professional productions in 1982. Since then, he has performed and created works in many of the world’s most prestigious spaces, including SFMOMA USA, Hayward Gallery London, Pompidou Centre Paris, Tate Modern London, Kunsthalle Vienna, Bolshoi Theatre Moscow, Hanoi Opera House Vietnam, and the Royal Opera House London.

To date, he has scored 75 contemporary dance productions, including works for the London Royal Ballet and Merce Cunningham. In 2016 he installed his Water Drops sound work in Rijeka Airport in Croatia, Ghosts at Cliveden National Trust UK, and scored the world’s first-ever Virtual Reality ballet, Nightfall.

In 2004 his Sound Surface (with Stephen Vitiello) was the first Sound Art commission for Tate Modern London. He scored the hit musical comedy Kirikou & Karaba (2007) and Narnia ballet (2015) based on the popular children’s book and the re-opening of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 2012.

Commercial work has included sound designing the Philips Wake-Up Light (2009), the Dream for Sprint Telephones/Leo Burnett in the USA, and the sound for the Cisco telephone systems used in offices around the world in 2019. Most recently he set up the Robin Rimbaud Art Foundation in the UK.

His work Salles des Departs is permanently installed in a working morgue in Paris whilst Vex, the residential house he designed a permanent soundtrack with Chance de Silva architects, won the RIBA London Award 2018 and was featured on the popular TV show Grand Designs.

Committed to working with cutting edge practitioners he collaborated with Bryan Ferry, Wayne MacGregor, Mike Kelley, Torres, Pauline Oliveros, Michael Nyman, Steve McQueen, Laurie Anderson, and Hussein Chalayan, amongst many others.