The ever-excellent Scanner, aka composer and sound artist Robin Rimbaud, has been added to this year’s Spitalfields Music Summer Festival as an "associate artist", producing his own interpretation of Lachrimae, an ayre by 16th-century lutenis John Dowland and enlisting The Haxan Cloak, Gazelle Twin and Computer Junk Orchestra to do the same.
Scanner’s performance, taking place at the Bishopsgate Institute on June 8, will be a collaboration with video director Chris Turner, "that uses epic macro images of the everyday, offering unusual perspectives of the world around us", and follows their recent collaboration ‘G(O)OD+(D)EVIL’, which you can watch below.
Rimbaud will be joined by The Haxan Cloak, whose response will be a piece for cello, guitar and treated percussion inspired by Dowland, alongside a set of cuts from his recent Excavation album, and Chris Cairns’ Computer Junk Orchestra, a collection of old photocopiers, fax machines and, yes, scanners, that will perform Lachrimae and Cairns’ own compositions.
Gazelle Twin, meanwhile, will be performing Flow Forms, "a linked series of intimate events exploring the anatomical, chemical and physical properties of crying", around a number of secret Brick Lane locations with the help of Laura Moody of Elysian Quartet and the Juice Vocal Trio. There’ll be three performances: 6.30pm on June 21/22, also 3.30pm on the 22nd.
Rimbaud touched on the performances in our recent interview ahead of our DRILL:LONDON festival: "They came to me and asked if I would be interested in being their Associate Artist. It basically means you come in, find a theme and invite other artists in. I invited Elizabeth – Gazelle Twin – and Bobby – Haxan Cloak – to make projects for it. I thought these are artists I really respect and admire, and how can I support them, because in my career people have been supportive as well. I approached them with the idea of looking at a piece of music written nearly 500 years ago by a British composer called John Dowland, called Lachrimae, and it’s almost like the earliest version of systems music, not unlike Steve Reich, Philip Glass. What Bobby and Elizabeth are doing is both taking these ideas and building it into their own processes. Bobby is making his own set completely inspired by these works with a film and a live drummer. I’m doing my own variation with a specially commissioned film, which is going to be very dark and very gothic. Elizabeth is taking four locations, and has the Elysian Quartet at one of them, a choir at another one, and you travel between locations and hear this piece of music at each one. They’re all unknown locations, mostly underground, in Spitalfields. It’s going to be a quite unsettling work."
For further details and tickets, head to the festival’s site here.
TWENTY6 Magazine / Issue ‘G’ / G(O)OD+(D)EVIL . A Film by Chris Turner from TWENTY6 Magazine on Vimeo.
