Bob Cobbing, Peter Finch, François Dufrêne, Helmer Bodil, Lawrence Upton

Balsam Flex was a cassette label run in London by the artist Erik Vonna-Michell in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It documented a moment when a group of British poets were taking their cues from sound art, conceptual art, visual poetry and performance, and many of them came through Writers Forum, the small press and workshop Bob Cobbing had founded in 1963 with Jeff Nuttall and John Rowan. Cobbing (1920-2002) is the centre of this LP, which gathers three separate Balsam Flex tapes issued between 1977 and 1980.

Side A has Cobbing in three duos. Trigram (Trilogy Four), with Helmer Bodil, dates from 1973 and came out on Balsam Flex in 1978. A Round Dance (1976-77) is with Lawrence Upton, who took over Writers Forum after Cobbing's death. Slowly, Slowly, The Tongue Unrolls was made in Paris in 1968 with François Dufrêne (1930-1982), the Lettrist and Nouveau Réaliste whose cri-rythmes go back to Futurist and Dada voice experiments, and the second side opens with another piece from the same Paris sessions, Computer Poem. The rest of side B is the whole of Big Band Dance Music, the 1977 cassette by the Welsh poet Peter Finch (born 1947): Blue, Miss Skin, Four Times As Many and Seasonal Cycle.

Slowscan vol. 36, published in 2017. Black vinyl in an offset printed sleeve with Finch's artwork from his original cassette, design by Johnny Van de Koolwijk. Edition of 250 copies (220 plus 30 artist's proofs).