Scanner takes interview material with Andy Warhol from the early 1970s as the starting point for a soundtrack which attempts to take something very ordinary and make it extraordinary. In answering a series of simple questions, Scanner has dug around inside the material to bring out unusual acoustical moments, expressed in Warhol’s choice of words, his breathing, his pauses between words.

Andy Warhol really believed in empty spaces. He constantly explored trivial moments: zooming in on surfaces in his pictures, offering fragile parts in his films, including all the “uhms” in his writings; catching the person exactly as he is manufactured at that very moment. He especially liked boredom, repetitiveness, copies, details. Scanner has been interested in the idea of the ‘sound polaroid’ for some time, capturing the sound of a person or a place for a particular moment, trawling the hidden noise of the modern metropolis as the symbol of the place where hidden meanings and missed contacts emerge.

For this CD Scanner takes interview material with Andy Warhol from the early 1970s as the starting point for a soundtrack which attempts to take something very ordinary and make it extraordinary. In answering a series of simple questions, Scanner has dug around inside the material to bring out unusual acoustical moments, expressed in Warhol’s choice of words, his breathing, his pauses between words. Dissolving the words, he tranforms the artifice of Warhol’s voice and interview technique and explores the eloquence and ominipresence of the idea of bordedom surrounding the pop artist.

As Warhol himself might have said about the work, “ Gee, uhm, it’s really up ‘there’.

Liner Notes:

a Sausage is just a sausage

“Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every
instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.”
(Charlotte Whitton)

No moral, aesthetic or metaphysical issue seemed more important to Andy
Warhol than the question of how to keep his pores clean.
“If someone asked me: “What’s your problem?” I’d have to say “Skin” […] If the pimple on my upper, right cheek is gone, a new one
turns up […] I think it’s the same pimple, moving from place to place.”

And Andy Warhol “really believe(s)[d] in empty spaces”. He seemed to be
constantly, constantly, CONSTANTLY exploring those: Zooming in on surfaces in his pictures, spotting peoples fragile parts in his films, including all the “uhms” in his writings; catching the person exactly as he is manufactured at that
very moment. – In a way so that it almost sounds like a Polaroid.

In that sense it is no surprise that Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner, chose
to make a one hour sound-piece of Warhol. Though, basing a 60-minute radiopiece for Bayerischer Rundfunk upon boredom, as is the case here, might seem a bit boring. Or as Warhol might have said: Gee, uhm, really up ‘there’.

Because Warhol really liked boredom. He liked repetitiveness,
copies, details. He liked the surface, the new technology. In fact: he would have liked to be a machine himself.

And so, Roland Barthes writes: “What Pop-Art wants is to desymbolize the object, that is, to release the image from deep meaning […] The pop-artist does not stand behind his work and he himself has no depth: He is merely the surface of his pictures, no signified, no intention, anywhere.”

So; surfaces…
I have been told that surfaces are flat, pictures two-dimensional,
sounds omni-directional and that “boredom becomes an object of interest
if you make it productive again”. I have also been told that Warhol was
mostly almost monosyllabic in verbal.
Wonder what happens, when taking him on the spot, writing down those
monogamously words and then voyeuristically use them to explore the
details of the flat surface. Will another dimension occur, or does it
just simply become boring?

“Gee, uhm, really up ‘there’” could for example just as well, with the “wrong” typewriter or type-setter have become: “Here, gee, umph, ‘true ally’” or: “Age-rule, ehm, here … ‘tup’”. And then suddenly not be as boring anymore, when bearing in mind that Warhol was homosexual.
And then suddenly, maybe, it also becomes quite interesting when Warhol describes all the domestic sausages hanging down from the roof in a fabric, as he does in the interview used for the one hour piece made by Scanner…

Because Scanner takes the sound as Warhol took the soup;
creating a universe where the looping everyday becomes interesting in
the blurred domesticity most people see as the very essence of plain,
repetitive boredom. – Touching upon the fact that it does not matter
how famous or ordinary you are: A sausage is just a sausage.
Or is it?
I guess it’s up to each individual to choose what to make of it. –
Warhol and Scanner are, it seems…, just showing us the cans / scan

April 2003, Mathilde Schytz Juul