Bob Cobbing ▪ »Bill Jubobe« ▪ Sound & Visual Poetry

TRACKLIST
00:03 ▪ ABC in Sound D-P-T
02:45 ▪ Khrajrej [extrait] (1972)
05:00 ▪ Hymn to the sacred mushroom (1975)
08:04 ▪ 15 Shakespeare-Kaku [excerpt]
10:46 ▪ As easy [excerpt]
13:30 ▪ Whississippi [excerpt]
17:11 ▪ Vive Rabelais (1968)
As a literature student, I visited Bob Cobbing (* 1920 † 2002) in Randolph Avenue, London. With him I hoped for inspirational hints for the use of electronic sound elements in the field of Sound Poetry. I met a charming, hospitable gentleman who willingly presented me, with a cup of tea, sound examples of records under the benevolent eyes of his jewelry making wife Jennifer. Some of the sound poems found their way from his portable record player to the cassette recorder I brought with me. They form in this small video the auditory context to Cobbing's graphic oeuvre, which is reflected in his little, self-designed book "Bill Jubobe" (1976) shown here.
Since the 1960s Cobbing issued countless, mostly self-published works from the genre of Concrete and Visual Poetry. Much of it he performed alone or with likeminded people in front of an interested audience. He networked internationally and, through his integrative personality, put to rail young artists from the fields of Concrete Poetry to electronic music. Until his death he never became tired to pursue his bibliophilic passion of printed matter and book publication.
"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.“
Source: www.tochnit-aleph.com/catalog/...
"Aesthetically uncompromising, and repellent to some, Cobbing's language experiments could also be fun - as his work with schoolchildren testified. He remained alert to the weird linguistic detritus he found everywhere.“ (Robert Sheppard, Guardian, Mon 7 Oct 2002)
Source: www.theguardian.com/news/2002/...
"In his later years, Cobbing discarded the use of tape in his live performances and became a strong practitioner in acoustical techniques which he felt had a far more resonant and richer articulatory control over the sonic aspects of expression than anything that one could gain by performing with tape or electro-acoustic devices.“
Source: switch.sjsu.edu/switch/sound/a...
Robert Walter Cobbing
∙ poet, born 30 July 1920 in Enfield, Middlesex
∙ 1942 married to Jean Dennis (two sons, marriage dissolved)
∙ 1954 married to Cissy Barnard (one son, two daughters, marriage dissolved)
∙ 1963 married to Jennifer Pike
∙ died 29 September 2002 in London
Further readings:
www.bobjubile.org/#bob
www.encyclopedia.com/article-1...
Linklist:
petermanson.wordpress.com/misc...
Als Literaturstudent besuchte ich Bob Cobbing (*1920 †2002) in der Randolph Avenue in London. Bei ihm erhoffte ich mir Anregungen zur Verwendung elektronischer Klangelemente im Genre der Sound Poetry. Ich traf auf einen liebenswürdigen, gastfreundlichen Herrn, der mir bei Tee und unter den wohlwollenden Augen seiner gerade an Schmuck handarbeitenden Ehefrau Jennifer bereitwillig Klangbeispiele von Schallplatten präsentierte. Einige der Klanggedichte fanden ihren Weg von seinem transportablen Plattenspieler auf meinen mitgebrachten Kassettenrekorder. Sie bilden in diesem kleinen Video den auditiven Kontext zu Cobbing’s grafischen Oeuvre, das sich in dem von ihm gestalteten kleinen Buch "Bill Jubobe“ (1976) wiederfindet.
Seit den 1960er Jahren gab Cobbing unzählige, im Selbstverlag publizierte Werke aus dem Genre der Concrete und Visual Poetry heraus. Vieles davon trug er vor interessiertem Publikum selbst oder mit Mitstreitern vor. Er vernetzte sich international und setzte junge Künstler aus den Bereichen der Concrete Poetry bis hin zur elektronischen Musik durch seine integrative Persönlichkeit auf die Schiene. Bis zu seinem Lebensende wurde er nicht müde, seiner bibliophilen Leidenschaft der Druckschrift- und Buchveröffentlichung nachzugehen.

[@bencolemanart]

Thanks for sharing: is this the version he recorded with the Beeb (radiophonic workshop) in 1965? Sounds like their work!