Curated by William Cobbing and Rosie Cooper

Opening Tuesday 8 October 2013, 6–8pm

Exhibition 9 October–22 November 2013

Exhibition Research Centre
Art and Design Academy
Liverpool John Moores University
Duckinfield Street
Liverpool L3 5RD
T 0151 904 1216

ABC in Sound is an exhibition about the pioneering British concrete and sound poet Bob Cobbing (1920-2002). Highlighting his personal collection, ABC in Sound represents the first opportunity to discover these documents, books, films, prints and sound pieces.

Cobbing is best known for his performed works in which language is anarchically stretched through the deployment of shouts, groans and hisses, interspersed between more recognisable tracts of spoken word. The exhibition will feature such recordings as the seminal ‘ABC in Sound’, made in 1964 for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, as well as recorded performances for Fylkingen Records in Stockholm, and the anarchic noise ensembles Birdyak and abAna. It will also include some of the innumerable publications and printed works that he made: visual scores involving pages of collaged words, often distorted on specialist printing presses, blurring the distinction between decipherable text and abstract imagery, the validity of the written word chaotically dismantled. He made one such work for the 1966 Destruction in Art Symposium live on stage, running the stencil for the symposium’s press release through a duplicating machine until it broke up.

more HERE