Disquiet

The new album by Scanner, Double Fold, on the Slovenian record label rx:tx, is apparently inspired by Nicholson Baker’s excellent book by that name, which was an alarming study of how libraries have forsaken their duty as custodians of our literary heritage, focusing in particular on the failures of microfilm to do justice to print newspapers. Two-minute RealAudio streams are currently available (on the posteverything.com site, here) for two segments of the album, “Microfilm” and “Ultrafiche,” both sprightly yet irritable stretches of glitchy minimalist momentum. Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud) writes of the project, on his own site (scannerdot.com), “Fold is one extended elastic track focusing on a pulse, 128 beats per minute. The book is an exploration of the dismantling of the greatest archives of our recorded heritage, paper as a resource now too fragile to store our history on.” He explains that he built the album as a collage of hundreds of fragments from his domestic tape archive.

By Marc Weidenbaum