Bob Cobbing: The Spoken Word (audio CD)

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Bob Cobbing (1920 - 2002) was a crucial figure in the British avant-garde poetry and publishing scenes of the latter half of the twentieth century. The primary focus of his energies was performance sound poetry, a pan-continental phenomenon whose practitioners dispensed with conventional poetic language and syntax almost entirely. For Cobbing, a graphic pattern was as fitting a score for performance as a text. The recordings in this collection are drawn mainly from private tapes now in the care of the British Library and include Cobbing's first commercially issued sound work '26 Sound Poems' plus collaborations with Annea Lockwood, Henri Chopin, François Dufrêne and others.

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Are Your Children Safe in the Sea, recorded in 1966

Reviews
'These recordings are a joy to listen to'.
Anne Hilde Neset, The Wire

'This superb British Library selection from Cobbings archive of chants, rants and growls, many of them not commercially available before opens with a 22-minute piece called 26 Sound Poems, which has the ritualistic gravity of Ginsbergs Howl, but is shorn, like everything here, of such cheap tricks as sense and meaning. The set closes with E Colony, Cobbing howling and adrift in John Whiting s electronic noise-storm. When's volume two?'
The Times

Track listing
1. 26 Sound Poems
2. Are Your Children Safe in the Sea
3. Worm
4. Soleil
5. Variations on a Theme of Tan
6. Slowly, Slowly the Tongue Unrolls
7. Computer Poem
8. Vive Rabelais
9. Whisper Piece No.3: Voitex
10. Hymn to the Sacred Mushroom (Konkrete Canticle)
11. e Colony