When confronted with a Turner Prize nomination, with all the attendant attention, and the prospect of going head to head in competition with their fellows, some artists shy away. Not so Nathan Coley. ‘I found it quite easy to say yes,’ he says, taking a break from installing his work at Tate Liverpool, ‘because it’s an accolade, because some really great artists have been nominated in the past - it’s good to be associated with that level of work - and, honestly, because it brings a huge audience to my work. And, in terms of the work that I’m making, I feel that it’s a good time to be shortlisted.’

On that last point, Coley is dead right. Not that his recent work has reached a new plateau, or eclipsed his past practice, instead he is at a stage in his career when past pieces and present projects seem to be gelling together, revealing resonances, some surprising.

This is apt. Coley’s sculptural objects and installations are, more often than not, deceptively simple, marked out by a tendency to develop slowly, disclosing new layers of meaning, long after the viewer first encounters them.

‘With individual pieces of work,’ Coley explains, ‘I neither seek to steal the show, nor am I interested in one-liners. My intention is for the work to have a number of ideas, a number of references.’

A good example, both of this deceptive simplicity and the increasing interconnections between his work, could be found at Coley’s recent outing at doggerfisher. Untitled (Threshold Sculpture), a slim beam of wood that blocked the entrance to the gallery, forced visitors to take care in stepping over it on their way into the space. ‘You can look at that work a being just a piece of wood on the floor,’ Coley explains, ‘maybe in the context of minimalism, but then you start thinking about the whole notion of the space you’re entering and the space you’re leaving, and then, it’s made of oak, which has a particular spiritual history and is, architecturally, used and loved by Modernists.’

Coley also sees the piece - which formally has little connection to works that have gone before - as closely linked to the work which first drew wide attention to his practice, a reconstruction of the witness box at the Lockerbie trials, made when he was ‘unofficial artist’ at the Hague: ‘It’s about the control of space, a demarcation of space, even though there’s no resemblance. Both come from my interest in how we show who we are through the architecture of our spaces.’

This talk of an innate connection between a block of oak and a witness box might make Coley sound like an arch conceptualist, with little interest in the physical manifestations of his ideas, but nothing could be further from the truth.

‘It’s a nice contradiction,’ he admits, ‘On the one hand I’m a person who makes objects, but I don’t think of that being the centre of the work. The object is somehow a mechanism to make the idea come to life.’

Indeed, he is close to incensed by references in the press to his piece We Must Cultivate Our Garden, the last line of Voltaire’s novel Candide illuminated and installed atop a building on St. Andrew’s Square in Edinburgh, being made of neon. ‘I took a lot of time and energy not making them neon!’, he says, ‘Neon has a long history in contemporary art, but I wanted to find something that had common or folk associations, so the light-bulbs are fairground light-bulbs, which means that the gravitas of the text is contradicted by the “circus is coming to town” feel of the piece, so you have one of the masters of the Enlightenment meeting the fairground and the football pitch.’

That installation, and his best-known work, Lamp of Sacrifice, 286 Places of Worship in Edinburgh - anonymous cardboard sculptures of every church listed in the Edinburgh Yellow Pages - point to a trait Coley shares with his fellow nominees, especially Mark Wallinger and Zarina Bhimji: an avowedly political bent.

‘Some people see a work like Lamp of Sacrifice as a celebration of faith,’ Coley says, ‘but for me it’s the absolute opposite. With We Must Cultivate Our Garden, that last line has been discussed at great length as being anti-church, anti-royalty and as being a call to arms for self-determination. So it’s no accident it’s on St. Andrew’s Square, named after this supposed saint of this supposed religion, Christianity.’

As for the big question - who will take the Prize? - Coley is sanguine. ‘The shortlisting is the thing that I’m excited about, not least because I have great respect for the other three who are shortlisted,’ he says, ‘The winning or the losing is a whole other thing, to do with the personal taste of the judges, to do with things that are outwith my control.’

This interview was first published in The Herald on October 12th, 2007.

The work of Trenton Doyle Hancock is underpinned by a vast and complex mythology, Homeric in scope and Biblical in tone.

The Mounds are good. The Vegans, deformed through inbreeding, are evil. Except for St. Sesom, that is. The visionary mystic, inspired by dreams in technicolour, and his followers - a gang that includes the conjoined twins Baby Curt and Shy Jerry, Bow-Headed Lou and Betto Watchhow - have long been waging a campaign to convert their fellow Vegans into loving the Mounds, instead of murdering them, and eating the pink moundmeat that oozes from them raw, instead of converting it into tofu, as is their current practice. This change in diet will, St. Sesom says, allow the Vegans to find 'spectral happiness', correcting a mutation in their makeup that makes them see in black and white. But - wait! -all is not well in Sesom's camp, his merry band are riven with factional infighting, caused in part by the saint's inflated ego, and a terrorist group, Black Brain, are causing trouble. It is also worth noting that, at some point in the distant past, the Mounds came into being when an ape-man, Homerbactus, ejaculated into a field of flowers, and the Vegans are descendants of Homerbactus too, the fruits of an incestuous relationship between Brouthescam and Cromalyna, his children.

At least, I think that's what's going on. Hancock's tales are spun out in text daubed on the gallery wall, as well as paintings, drawings and sculpture; the narrative flowing between different media, the canonical version of the story impossible to glean without being fully immersed inside the installation.

'The narrative exists as a grid,' Hancock explains, 'I had been creating characters for several years, making portraits of characters - really self-portraits of different aspects of myself - and I had no real intention of turning it into a mythology. But after graduate school, I was looking for a voice. I had made all these characters that existed on their own, and I needed a way to tie them all together, I invented the narrative to develop a dialogue between these paintings, these characters, and, actually, between modes of operation - performance, sculpture, painting, drawing.'

This last point is key. For, though the tales of St. Sesom & Co. may appear to be, well, a wee bit silly, they are the glue that binds together a sophisticated, densely layered practice. At its heart is an alchemical mingling of languages, textual and visual. Hancock's writing does not describe his images, nor do his images illustrate his texts, instead, there is a fluid interplay between the two.

'It goes in both directions,' he says, 'with everything meeting up in the middle somewhere. I never know when I'm going to have to amend the story to fit something in from a painting, or whether there's going to be some sort of organic offshoot that is out of my directorial control. Sometimes I just have to follow.'

This admixture of the linguistic and visual is matched by a jackdaw approach to influences. A typical Hancock painting, if there is such a thing, draws on comic and fantasy art, borrows from Surrealism, Cubism, Modernism--pretty much every -ism you can think of, in fact--and matches scatological humour with high theory.

'I'm definitely very conscious of "the filter",' Hancock says, 'of how I bring in low art or comics, when I'm constantly thinking about the history of painting. I try make sense of it all, to make it all coexist.'

Looking at Hancock's installation, which fills both floors of the Fruitmarket to bursting point, it does not make sense according to the usual meaning of the term. The heavily worked canvases clash obsessive, meticulous detailing against broad brush strokes and clumsily applied felt and bottle tops, depicting tangles of bony arms, or hideous great globs peppered with gaping orifices, all shot through with queasy Pepto Bismol pink, the colour of moundmeat. The allusions are dizzying, too - here Dali struggles against Robert Crumb, there a patch of Cubist abstraction snuggles up against a child-like doodle.

But, hidden in this all-engulfing flood of images and ideas are hints of order. Hands point and pinch, fists are raised, daggers clasped, suggesting an underlying code. Words and phrases are repeated in the text scrawled across the gallery walls, swimming into sharp focus. Works play off each other, with shapes recurring and shifting across the paintings and drawings, underscoring the surface narrative with a sort of formally expressed unconscious.

Slowly but surely, it is possible to enter Hancock's world, to find darker subtleties in his apparently obvious allegory of tolerance, and to unearth the deep links between text and image.

So, is Hancock worried that his first solo show in Europe might overwhelm his audience? 'Well,' he says, deadpan, 'they will have to make several trips.'

The best-seller lists are not, for obvious reasons, packed with Victorian novels, but Michel Faber’s latest, The Crimson Petal & The White revives the form. The book is set in the 1870s, and tells the story of Sugar, a prostitute dragging herself up the ladder to polite society thanks to an association with William Rackham, a perfume magnate with literary pretensions. We also meet Rackham’s sickly spouse Agnes, his neglected daughter Sophie and pious brother Henry, who, in turn, is smitten by Emiline Fox, a campaigner for the rights of fallen women.

This is not, then, a terse thriller, nor a coldly intellectual chunk of postmodernism. So, why did Faber strike out against current literary tastes to craft an historical novel, in both setting and style?

‘I’ve been writing novels since I was a kid,’ he explains, ‘and all the novels I wrote in my early teens would die after ten or forty or a hundred pages, because I would start them in a rush of enthusiasm, and I would think that that momentum would carry me through to the end, but i would get stuck, and that novel would die. Eventually I decided that there had to be a better way of writing a novel than this, and decided to write a Victorian novel, that was completely planned out, like a piece of well laid architecture or something. Everything at the start would reflect something at the end. I would know exactly what happened to every character, and when and where. I had this immensely complicated plan written up for it, virtually down to the paragraphs in the chapters. And it worked, because i finished it.’

It is not The Crimson Petal’s multilayered, at times dizzying plot that leaps from the page, however, but the language. Each of those carefully mapped paragraphs vies with it’s predecessor, with vivid prose, whether describing the sordid ablutions of a back street whore or the curve of a lady’s whalebone corsetry, that conjours up the world inhabited by Sugar and the Rackhams.

‘It’s difficult to get away with that nowadays,’ Faber admits, ‘because American thrillers have had such an influence on what people think good prose is. Everything is meant to be stripped down to the bones. I think Stephen King was quoted as saying, ‘Adverbs are your enemy,’ and there’s this idea that you should remain utterly simple. I think sometimes it’s good to have a big sumptuous meal of prose and really get lost in it, to have all the pictures put on for you, not having to imagine them for yourself, but to have them created by the writing. I thought if i did that in a Victorian novel, then people wouldn’t complain, because that’s what you expect in a Victorian novel.’

The Crimson Petal isn’t simply a window into a lost world; the novel tackles contemporary, and weighty, concerns, and the question of class in particular. ‘For most of my life I have lived in circumstances that other people would describe as poverty,’ Faber says, ‘and I went to university with people who came from backgrounds of great privilege. For me one of the things which drives The Crimson Petal is that clash between the marginalised working class anger of Sugar and the reality of that position when you move away from poverty and realise there are some wonderful things about being middle class. I’ve always been very interested in that journey from a very alienated damaged past towards something that’s more functional, more connected to the rest of humanity.’

While it is, perhaps, dangerous to attempt a psychoanalysis of an author in order to find further meaning in his work, Faber’s interest in that journey from damaged past to functional present is not a theoretical one. The author’s life to date has been unconventional, to say the least. Born in Holland, at the age of seven Faber emigrated, against his wishes, to Australia, and other family members were left behind by his parents. Once in Australia, Faber spent his formative years largely in isolation, without much in the way of human contact. It cannot be a coincidence that The Crimson Petal is a book about outsiders, with every character a fish out of water.

‘I was taken away from Holland and taken to Australia,’ Faber confirms, ‘and even though I’m very happy that I grew up there, it didn’t feel like my home. So, I felt like an alien there, and of course now I’m in Scotland, I don’t fit in here either. There is one experience, one that I’ve been reluctant to bring up, because it might sound like I’m tailoring what I say for the readership of the Big Issue, but I did spend a short time homeless in London, in the early 80s. It was not for very long, but I spent that week sleeping in parks, and in doss-houses. Of course this was in the Thatcher era, so there was a very sharp division between the haves and the have nots, sharper even than now. I wouldn’t exchange that experience for anything, it was difficult but very constructive. I think that experience of the struggle of surviving, of finding a place to sleep and finding something to eat, does inform the early part of the novel.’

‘It’s the most autobiographical book I’ve written,’ he continues,’That sounds bizarre given that it’s a Victorian novel set in 1875, but I think there’s that idea of being very alienated, being on the margins of society, and looking at all those middle class people, those connected people, and saying ‘I hate you all, I despise everything you stand for!’ That was very much me when I was 18 years old. But that energy you get from anger and from pitting yourself against everything that is conventional and benign, it isn’t enough to get you through life. Eventually you do want to be more connected, and accepted. You don’t have the energy any more to hate, to rail against everything. The experience that Sugar has in the book mirrors the growth that i had over the 20 years that i wrote different versions of it.’

With The Crimson Petal & The White, then, Faber has crafted a rich work, taking on a Victorian form, style and setting - which in other hands might have been a mere conceit - and put it to work exploring themes that exercise us today, managing all the while to spin sugary prose, that, at times, takes your breath away. It’s a trite phrase to end on, but if you read one novel this year, this is it.

This interview was first publised in The Big Issue in September, 2002.

You can read the full interview conducted for this piece here.

When most artists claim to be one of a kind, mould-breakers or unique entities in the history of music, it’s hard not to suppress a snigger. When Diamanda Galas says, albeit laughing, that she belongs to ‘the isolated tradition of me’ it is impossible to disagree.

Pick any facet of her lengthy career, and it’s hard to find points of comparison. She has an unearthly voice, that can comfortably stretch across four octaves, effortlessly switching from an operatic diva-screech to a low blues growl. Her lyrical concerns are not your average pop fodder, either: Galas’ most famous work is Plague Mass, a constantly developing, confrontational meditation on the impact of the AIDS virus that claimed the life of her brother, the playwright Philip Dimitri Galas. Her latest work, to be performed at the CCA this week, is Defixiones, Will and Testament, a piece dealing with Armenian genocide and Middle Eastern politics.

‘I’m like the one person in the crowd who says, “Everybody is saying this one fucking thing, but what about this thing that needs to be said?”’ Galas says, explaining the genesis of her music, ‘I have a choice: I can go home and not say anything, and go home safely, or I can say it and have everybody call me a fucking asshole. Well, I’ll pick the second one, because that allows me to go to sleep at night, where if I picked the first one, that would kill me, it would just kill me.’

Galas is, then, unafraid to tackle issues many would seek to sweep under the carpet, but she is not to be confused with a campaigner or protest singer, a fact which becomes clear the more inaccessible she makes her music, drawing on obscure texts in numerous languages and incorporating elements of everything from contemporary classical to traditional Middle Eastern music via blues standards. ‘I’m not a fucking propagandist,’ she says, ‘If someone used something I’ve said on a poster I’d probably be the first to faint. In disgust. When I was first working on Plague Mass, people were saying, “Hey, you’re singing this in like ten different languages, maybe you should do it all in English,” and I was like, ‘Oh right, only people who speak English are getting this virus, how could I have not realised this?’ No! The most important thing is that I know what the fuck I’m singing about, I’m not going to make it more simple so that you and Joe Blow over there can figure it out.’

As with the work on AIDS, Galas’ current work on Armenia is rooted in the personal as well as the political, tying together musical influences with the Galas family history. ‘Well, here I am, an Anatolian Greek - a middle eastern Greek - and I’m an American, which is a bloody weird combination,’ she explains, ‘It already says that I’m a Greek in the middle east, which means living under the influence of the Turks as a slave to Islam, and that has a lot to do with Defixiones. Then you have the American side, which is, well… the finest music here that I know is from the south, whether it’s white country blues, or black country blues, it’s really powerful music. I think that when you’re coming out of a culture like that, that was dominated for many, many years, you see the death of your culture through disinterest and powerful interests from outside. That’s what the work is about in a way, the betrayal of these countries by the large powers.’

Defixiones, then, is nothing if not timely and, since few musicians are willing or able to tackle such topics at all, let alone with the breathtaking power that characterises Galas’ live work, her performances at the CCA are unmissable.

This interview was first published in The List in September, 2002.

You can read the full interview conducted for this piece here.

Nahum Tevet has a problem. The Tel Aviv artist is readying himself for his first solo show in the UK at DCA, but the single work he plans to show, Seven Walks, has been trapped in Israel thanks to industrial action by the country’s dock-workers.

‘It is not,’ Tevet says, stoically, ‘the optimal situation. My work was held less than 24 hours before it was due to leave the port. Just my luck.’

For any artist, a logistical hiccup like this would be a blow, but where others might dash off a few new pieces, or go on a Duchampian hunt for found objects, Tevet’s practice precludes such stop-gap measures.

Using familiar, everyday materials to craft equally familiar forms - tables, partitions, simple cubes - Tevet works on a vast scale, assembling component sculptures into complex room installations that resemble cityscapes, even entire worlds. Seven Walks is his largest piece to date, and has been in production since 1998.

‘Since the early nineties,’ he explains, ‘I have been pushing my work, starting a new chapter. I took some decisions after a career retrospective in ‘92. One was to push my interest in complexity and multiplicity to a certain edge. Another was to make work that it is impossible for the viewer to get a hold on.’

That is not to say that Tevet pushes his audience away, intending his vast assemblages to be monumental works that bellow a single concept at the viewer. Quite the reverse, in fact.

‘I want to attack the idea that you can see something, and right away know everything about it,’ he says, ‘I am playing with that modernist or minimalist tradition, with objects we associate with a that tradition or discipline. I do this by using simple forms, but inserting into that not only complexity but also little stories, a narrative. It’s all about throwing hints, and pulling back.’

Tevet achieves this effect - a dialogue with art history that is, too, a conversation with the viewer - by the careful placement of the individual forms that make up his large-scale works.

‘There is one element that is like a partition,’ he explains, ‘together they create a wall you want to see behind. There is a lot happening behind these walls. When you look at the work, you know you are missing something, and if you move a little you will see, but again something prevents you from seeing, and only your imagination will allow you inside. I work a lot at creating very tempting views, so there is this interesting effect of being drawn in, but staying outside.’

This teasing, playful aspect to Tevet’s installations mirrors the artist’s working practice. The sheer scale of Seven Walks was prompted in part by a move to a new studio, a former basketball court - ‘Luckily it wasn’t a football pitch,’ Tevet jokes, ‘or I would have been working for twenty years!’ - a space that allowed the sculptor to keep on sculpting, adding more to Seven Walks as each part suggested the next. ‘When I am working, I am the viewer,’ Tevet says of the relationship between his methods and the gallery-goer’s experience, ‘When it takes so long to do a piece, by the time I am on the fifth or sixth year I forget what I started with, so it is really about whether it works for me or not. If I am excited about something, I would love the viewer to have a similar experience. The time is important too. I wouldn’t ask anyone to spend seven years looking at Seven Walks, but it is so different from the way people are used to seeing art today - they run in and see things like they see things in a mall. You can’t have a dialogue with the world if you are always running.’

So, Seven Walks is a dense, layered installation, one that demands a long look, but, with much of it caught up in the dock-workers strike, how will it look next Saturday, when DCA opens its doors?

‘That depends,’ Tevet says, chuckling, ‘on how quickly we can open the crates. When people come, they will see a drawing on the floor, with the letters and numbers that will allow us to install the work, and about twenty percent of the work in place. I would prefer to have it ready, of course, but this way it is like a glimpse, a work in progress. And, if people come back, they will perhaps be more amazed at the finished work.’

The opening night will, then, be something of an aperitif; a unique chance to catch Tevet part-way through the process of realising a piece he has spent the better part of a decade assembling, before drinking in the completed work. Perhaps that ill-timed strike was a happy accident after all.

Jamie Reid will forever be associated with punk and the Sex Pistols. His bold mash up of photocopied found images and blackmail cut and paste sloganeering defined an era, but there is much more to Reid than piercing the queen’s lip with a safety pin.

‘That’s just being a victim of the media,’ he says, seemingly unconcerned that a few striking images have defined his career in the public eye, ‘and people do forget that there’s thirty years of my work: the stuff that I did with the Pistols was predated by the Suburban Press work, and since then there’s been work on No Clause 28 campaigns, the Criminal Justice Bill, the Poll Tax right up to the No Logo movement now, and that’s the kind of stuff people know me for. But there’s always been other work that I’ve done that’s to do with mysticism and magic, much more esoteric stuff.’

These two elements, the political and the spiritual, have been the cornerstones of Reid’s work from his earliest forays into design. ‘I was brought up as a Druid and a socialist,’ he explains, ‘and I’ve incorporated those two things. The famous punk work came from a political background with the Suburban Press. It was all very community-based, and leaning into anarchist and situationist areas. We did a lot about council and business corruption, anti-racism, the women’s movement, that kind of thing.’

‘We had no money, so we were cutting things out of newspapers and magazines, and because we had our own printing press we were really able to experiment. It was out of that that we formulated the look that became punk. But I’ve always believed you need political change, but you need spiritual change as well, which is where my Druidism comes in.’

Reid’s latest show, Peace is Tough, is an all-encompassing look at these two strands, from situationist and anarchist DIY publishing to Druid-inspired wall-hangings. Most of all the show is set to reconfigure the Arches in line with Reid’s current preoccupation with creating whole environments instead of stand-alone artworks, as seen at Strongroom Studios in London’s East End.

‘The Strongroom project is something I’ve really enjoyed because I’ve been able to take a lot of ideas from my Druidism, Shamanism and magic and put them in a DIY practical context, using colour and symbols and glyphs to create a working environment that actually inspired the creation of sound. In a way it’s just as subversive as anything else I’ve done, because I think it fundamentally changes the whole creation of a working space. I firmly believe that 20th Century architecture, and the architecture of the last two millennia, has been about enslavement, and brainwashing people. I think you can make working spaces that actually inspire.’

The transformation of Reid’s space in the Arches is, in the spirit of punk, as yet, loosely defined. ‘We’ll just see what happens,’ Reid says, laughing, ‘I’m taking the work up there, but until it’s on the walls I won’t know how it’s going to work, and we’re hanging it the day of the opening, which is what I’m used to, really, because most of my work recently has been seen in clubs and at festivals where the visual artist is always at the bottom of the pile below the DJs and soundchecks for bands, it’s quite rare for me to be involved with a gallery.’

‘There’s a collaboration with a Russian laser artist called Alexei Blinov, and a drummer Saul Hughes. We’ve done some collaborations in the past, and Alexei is a great experimenter and we’ve come up with a system where I can draw live, and he gets it straight out as a laser image that has that hologram look. There’s a great spontaneity about what we’ll be doing, then there’s a multimedia element with slides and video of 30 years worth of my work.’

Jamie Reid’s contribution to the FuncT festival is both a retrospective and a chance to catch the designer and artist’s latest hi-tech project. Not that Reid has abandoned the scissors ‘n’ glue approach. ‘I’m still very much in to the collage and cut and paste,’ he says, ‘I think you can take a very punk attitude with computers, but I think they’re very untactile. I like to get my hands dirty.’

Robin Rimbaud, better known as Scanner, is a difficult man to pin down. For some, he’s a key practitioner in what current artspeak calls time-based art, others know him as a sound designer for the theatre. Avid readers of the tabloids and fans of avant-garde music alike will remember the controversy surrounding his series of albums containing cut-up collages culled from endless eavesdropping on mobile ‘phone conversations.

‘I never really know what I should call myself,’ Rimbaud admits, ‘so I just use the phrase a newspaper last called me. I’ve been dubbed all these terrible titles over the years, things like ‘minimalist anti-hero.’ In Belgium a magazine just came out with the headline ‘Scanner - the man who sucks off the whole of London.’ I’m sure they were referring to the fact that I Hoover up all these unusual sounds, but they conjured up a rather strange image.’ Whatever you call the cross-media polymath, his projects all contain a common thread: this is the output of an artist who seems to be overwhelmed with enthusiasm when it comes to sound in all it’s forms and equally concerned with a need to uncover new means of presenting his obsession.

‘I’m not somebody who set out and said, ‘I must become an artist,’ Rimbaud explains, ‘I’m somebody who began using sound in the work I’ve done from the earliest age, but somehow, and I can’t explain why, it’s drifted and expanded into all these different areas. When I was about fourteen, I used to have a reel-to-reel tape recorder and used it to make big loops of tape around my room of sounds from outside, or recorded the sound of defrosting our fridge at home, which didn’t go down too well with my mother, but, you know, a boy has to experiment!’

‘There’s always been these odd moments, just because I had a tape recorder, I used to record sounds, the way people now have video cameras and use them to record inane situations . Sometimes technology enables you to do something, and you just start playing without really knowing why. I think that’s important, most of the projects I’ve done have had serious intent, but there’s meant to be a playful element in there somewhere.’ As the antithesis of the usual po-faced sonic experimenter, Rimbaud’s latest project is nothing if not playful. He has released a long-player, Wave of Light by Wave of Light, using a new nom de guerre, Scannerfunk.

As the new pseudonym suggests, this is a record that is a far cry from the investigations of sonic textures that characterised earlier music works. Referencing disco, house and techno, the disc is, well, funky. Not to mention danceable and, just about, mainstream. It is also, once you dip below the surface, in the tradition of Rimbaud’s aural investigations. ‘I wanted to make one record as a singular statement,’ he says, ‘a rhythmic record, for home-listening in a sense and with a central groove. I realise that any beat is a very seductive tool and, you can draw people into listening the most eclectic and unusual sounds just by adhering to a simple beat. I’ve used things like software that changes photographs into noises, so one of the rhythm tracks is made up entirely of photos of Lenny Kravitz! The record is filled with these rather playful uses of sound, but you don’t necessarily have to find them, because the surface level is bright shiny electronic music. It’s meant to be fun.’

It is impossible to predict what Robin Rimbaud will do next, but there’s one thing for certain, it won’t be the same as what he’s done before: ‘I do seem,’ he says, ‘to be getting more eccentric.’

Scannerfunk’s Wave of Light by Wave of Light is out now on Sulphur Records.