Kenneth Goldsmith

All Avant-Garde All The Time: The Sounds of The UK

All Avant-Garde All The Time – UbuWeb Podcast #9: The Sounds of the UK from the 1960s To Yesterday

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Produced by The Poetry Foundation, UbuWeb is pleased to announce the latest in its podcast series, focusing on a dozen of Ubu’s hidden treasures, highlighting audio works that you really should know about about but most likely don’t. With this podcast, we continue our series focusing on the sounds of different regions. Here the focus is on the avant-garde language-based audio coming out of the UK. Beginning with Bob Cobbing and making our way through the the swinging London scene of the 60s, and the political / punk work of the 70s, and ending up with the electronics and samples of today, we cut a path through the London (and beyond) underground. Featured here are works by Bob Cobbing, Neil Mills, Lily Greenham, Cornelius Cardew, Christopher Logue, Richard Long, Art & Language + The Red Krayloa, Furious Pig, Momus, People Like Us, and Caroline Bergvall. You can subscribe to our podcast here.

07.23.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (14)

Travis Nichols

Mothertongues in China, Nixon in Navajo

Nixon in China has been blaring from my speakers for the past month, partially because I love operas in English (Peter Grimes), but also because, well, the Olympics!
In Italian or German or French or what have you, the full dramaturgical dullness of many lines gets lost on me, but here lines like “Your flight was smooth, I hope?” sung at full bellow have me rolling on the floor with glee.
Opera, like poetry, is wonderfully goofy.

08.08.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Travis Nichols

Summer Jams

While the context of a reading can often mean everything, there is also something to be said for readings ripped free from their spatial/temporal trappings and escorted into the private, headphoned world.

07.14.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (14)

Major Jackson

Literary Podcasts

Confession #4,080: I am a podcast junkie. A near-brutal, weekly commute last year forced me to seek alternatives to NPR’s apple-pie programming. Don’t get me wrong: I wish I had Scott Simon’s intelligent, bubbly voice, and who does not wish to be interviewed by Terry Gross, if only for the opportunity to elicit her infectious, on-air laughter with a sly, smart joke, to fall into her sweet, joyful, amused giggle that corrals us, all of us, into one wholesome tribe of clever Americans. One summer, while driving across country, in less friendly, unfamiliar terrain, NPR proved to be a welcomed sign of intelligent life. So, my beef? It’s just that, while Top 40 music can make one dumb, NPR tends to render its listeners immensely smug, “informed,” and homey.

11.05.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (18)