Avant-Garde All The Time – The Sounds of the UK
December 10th, 2009 by James BridleSurprised to see I haven't posted anything before from Kenneth Goldsmith's extraordinary podcast for the Poetry Foundation, Avant-Garde All The Time, which features sound works from the UbuWeb archives.
UbuWeb is an incredible resource for avant-garde material available on the internet, opened in 1996. It offers visual, concrete and sound poetry, and has expanded to include film and sound art mp3 archives. Every six weeks or so, Goldsmith (the founder) picks through the mp3s and builds a twenty minute themed collection that is always worth a listen.
I was prompted to post by the latest episode - The Women of the Avant-Garde (part 2) - as it's a particularly fine example of the strange sounds emanating from the UbuWeb vaults, as well as a revelatory mining of a rich seam of little-known, women-led art practice. But it also contains a lot of profanity and one particular segment where visual artist Lauren Lesko puts a microphone where only a woman can.
So, for our more sensitive listeners, an older episode - a wide-ranging survey of British sound poets and artists from the 1960s to the present, featuring Bob Cobbing, Neil Mills, Liliy Greenham, Chirstopher Logue, Ann Laplantine, and more [MP3]. But I urge you to have a listen, and subscribe, to all of Avant-Garde All The Time - which can be found at the Poetry Foundation website.