Bob Cobbing

About

Bob Cobbing, an alchemist of language and sound, sculpted the British Poetry Revival into a cacophonous landscape of concrete and performance poetry. His work, spanning from 1920 to 1994, traverses the liminal spaces where text morphs into sound and visual art into ephemeral experience. Cobbing's output, captured in 116 archival releases, is a testament to his relentless drive to dissolve boundaries between mediums. Anchored in the UK, Cobbing's collaborations with labels like Writers Forum and Balsam Flex reveal a process-driven ethos, where each magazine and cassette becomes a fractal of experimentation. Cobbing's ABC in Sound, notably reaching its fifth iteration in 1994, stands as a pivotal release—a sculptural exploration of phonetic architecture. Each edition reconfigures the alphabet into new auditory landscapes, challenging listeners to engage with the materiality of language itself. His process was interdisciplinary, merging poetic improvisation with visual art forms, as seen in releases like Voice Prints (1993) and the Improvisation is a dirty word collection (1990). The Writers Forum, a recurring collaborator, provided a fertile ground for Cobbing's avant-garde vision. This partnership birthed numerous series like Stracci (1988) and BOTHBOTH (1987), where textual and auditory elements intertwine, creating a multifaceted dialogue between paper and voice. In the company of peers like Henri Chopin and François Dufrêne, Cobbing's work resonates within a network of like-minded innovators, each contributing to an evolving conversation in experimental artistry.