On the night of 11 March 1995, a man tries to talk his mate into going out. A woman has a row with her boyfriend down the phone. Somewhere else on the dial, a pair of men argue the finer points of a boxing match, and a couple of women swap medical advice they'd rather their doctors hadn't heard secondhand. None of them know it, but every word is being picked up live off a cordless-phone frequency and piped into a room full of strangers at the Purcell Room on London's Southbank.
Nobody on the other end of the line ever finds out they had an audience.
That's the premise Robin Rimbaud built his Scanner project around. Trained on piano from childhood and introduced to John Cage's work at the age of eleven, Rimbaud found his own version of that fascination with interference as a teenager, listening to Brian Eno's On Land on a stereo that kept picking up stray CB radio chatter. He picked up a handheld radio scanner in 1992, discovered it could pull in the unencrypted chatter of cordless and early mobile phones, and began weaving what he heard into his live sets and records, treating the results, over the years, as documents rather than violations.
Sulphur is that instinct caught at its most theatrical. Recorded live at the Purcell Room and released the same year, 1995, on the Belgian label Sub Rosa, the six tracks, among them Radio Entry, Through Seven Doors and Flâneur Électronique, stitch scanner intercepts into drones, granular textures and the occasional jolt of near-silence, the intercepted voices arriving and receding like something overheard through a wall rather than samples dropped in for effect. There's no score in the conventional sense; the material simply arrives as it arrives, and Rimbaud shapes it in real time in front of an audience who can hear exactly how compromised the privacy of a phone call used to be. It followed a run of early releases on Ash International that had already established the method, but doing it live, with no safety net if the airwaves went quiet, was a different proposition entirely.
It's tempting to place Sulphur alongside Cage's radios or Stockhausen's shortwave experiments, and the lineage is real, but Rimbaud's material was never abstract noise. It was other people's Tuesday nights. That distinction is what's kept the Scanner name relevant across three decades of gallery installations, soundtrack work, and collaborations with figures like Michael Nyman and choreographer Wayne McGregor: Rimbaud never lost interest in the human voice caught somewhere it wasn't meant to be heard, and Sulphur remains the record where that idea sounds most like eavesdropping and least like art.
