Counting Backwards is a new series of text-sound-performance events. It takes place on the first Thursday of alternate months at Fuel cafe bar in Withington. The first event is on Thursday 3 June 2010. Entrance is free. Performing at the first event are Mike Cannell, THF Drenching and Holly Pester.

Mike Cannell is an intermedia poly-poet from west Midlands who works in visual, linear and sound poetry of various types. His work is primarily concerned with exploration of the materiality and emotional power of language. He releases the experimental sound poetry podcast l,angu(ages)paz,m, which is to be regarded as both one long, ongoing sound poem and an audio essay proclaiming ideas regarding experimental poetics He is also is the editor of würm, a monthly e-magazine showcasing experimental poetry of all kinds. His work including many e-books can be found at: http://visoundtextpoem.blogspot.com/, worbdlog, {n/o/t/a/t/w/i/t}. His work has featured in online periodicals such as Otoliths and wordforword.

THF Drenching is a free improvisor and composer of musique concrète, based in Manchester, England. As a dictaphone-player, he was one fifth of Derek Bailey’s final band Limescale, and has played with many of the UK’s best improvisors. He was also half of the bricks and dictaphone duo Pleasure-Drenching Improvers. As a poet (writing under his slave name, Stuart Calton) he’s published four books. Three came out on Barque Press and one is self-published. His fifth is awaiting publication. As a composer, he’s completed thirteen albums of musique concrète, electronic music and various dubious overdubbed semi-improvised amalgams.

Holly Pester is an experimental sound poet and writer undergoing practice-led research at Birkbeck, University of London in ‘Speech and the Archive in Intermedia Poetry’. Her performance texts are experiments in the sound and shape of speech, blending pre-verbal noises with semantic surrealism in an investigation into language transmission. She is currently investigating the sound aesthetic of the ‘radio-voice’ and the poetic qualities of analog sound.

Holly Pester regularly performs her poetry at art and literary events in the UK including the Serpentine Gallery Poetry Marathon and the upcoming Text Festival 2011. This also includes collaborative works with regular co-performers Jamie Wilkes and Abbi Oborne. She has been published in numerous journals and an anthology of London poets, City State.

Examples of her work and theory can be found at hollypester.com

Richard Barrett, Matt Dalby, Gary Fisher

Counting Backwards editors
countingback@yahoo.co.uk

http://tingbckwrds.wordpress.com/