The instructions are out there; the commentaries are available. We are to get dumber. Smart may have been sexy over a few vodka martinis at the Algonquin Hotel when Dorothy Parker queen-bee'd it over society. But eighty years on, smart is so yesterday. Dumb reigns like a friendly fascist tyrant. Dumb allows free expression, unchained by any assumption of intelligent cohesion. Dumb cannot be questioned.

Scanner's Robin Rimbaud, under the slightly modified Scannerfunk moniker, has dumbed down the intellectual art-installation approach to his recording career. Revered in white-space circles for his voyeuristic, Arts Council-funded radio-ham critique on the complex personal/public paradox, Rimbaud has submerged his dialectical dialog with the mobile phone massive in favor of producing what may be termed in less rigorous (more dumber) periodicals as "intelligent trance."

After a Steve Reichian trill called "I Am Calm," Rimbaud defines his new style with the mercurial "Light Turned Down." While this track is, on its dumbest level, a blatant rip-off of Jam and Spoon's "Waiting for Stella" mix of Age of Love's eponymous track, a classic Scanner sample of phone conversations lurks beneath the superficiality. Conspiracy fiends will doubtlessly and falsely detect a species of mind control buried in these utterances, but using a recently developed (and highly proprietary) Pitchfork decryption algorithm, I can reveal that the phone conversation is between two housewives from Reston, Virginia, on the subject of the "sweet thang" who has just moved in next door to one of them.

After replacing a few component relays in the machine that stores the algorithm, I felt cheated, as the message of "Automatic" needs no translation. A kittenish waif chants the title as Rimbaud performs all his favorite trance clichés, but redeems himself by leaving out the rib-cracking kick drum. Less is once again proved to be more. Rimbaud returns to more Scanner-ish style for the downbeat reverb-heavy "Speechless," and continues this less barnstorming, more Mazda-oriented approach with his "Porcelain"-ish "Ice That Abandons Me." It's coolly gratifying when he finds his way back to the brainiac-trance of "Spinique" and the minimal thumping of the Cologne-clone "Vault."

Wave of Light by Wave of Light is unmistakably a Scanner album. There's a comfort here. However strenuously Rimbaud tries to dumb it down for the Crasher kids and the P.L.U.R. drones, he leaves more than residual traces of his deep ambient self. He subverts the most popular and most blandly trite genre and proves that certain individuals' dumb is more erudite than most people's smart.

-Paul Cooper