Issue #13 of TALKER is a conversation with Bobby Baker. Bobby’s acclaimed intersectional feminist practice includes performance, drawing, and installation. It persistently exposes the undervalued and stigmatised aspects of women’s daily lives. Her live work in particular has been a distinctive and significant contribution to the shape performance art has taken over the past five decades. In this career-spanning interview, Bobby describes her creative journey from encounters with a germinal performance art scene at St. Martins School of Art in the early 1970s to current collaborative and participatory projects.  She is generously open about her process, sharing accounts of a practice that, though often playfully witty and wild, never shies from darker and more complex themes bound up in challenges with mental health, structural sexism and gendered labour in domestic spaces. Her 1976 installation, An Edible Family in a Mobile Home (1976) was remade in 2023 as part of Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970–1990 at Tate Britain which toured to the Whitworth, Manchester in 2025.   Regular price£8.00Giles Bailey, 2025 Softcover Staplebound, 280 x 180mm, 20pp Risograph throughout

Ross Bolleter's latest collection of poems draws on his experience as a musician/composer especially in the field of ruined piano, and includes tributes to Thelonious Monk and other luminaries who have inspired him over a lifetime of musical and poetic creation. This new book explores the themes of childhood, eros, love, death—and football.       Ross Bolleter (born 1946 in Subiaco, Western Australia) is an Australian avantgarde composer and and improviser notable for his experimentation on old pianos that have been found after having been left exposed to the action of time and weather (he classifies his pianos into different categories: neglected, abandoned, weathered, decayed, ruined, devastated, decomposed, annihilated), thus acquiring novel and unexpected musical possibilities. His recordings are published by the Emanem and WARPS (World Association for Ruined Piano Studies) labels. In 2021, he released the great Total Piano on Thödol Records.  bilingual edition (English / French) 12 x 18 cm (softcover), 220 pp Lenka Lente, 2025

A new poetry collection considers the relationship between sound and meaning, and the significance of the pause in language.The Etruscan language knew no blank spaces, no breaks between words. Its texture resembled an uninterrupted flow of speech—more singing than speaking, more form than content. Only in the dictum of the pause and the meaningful fragmentation of the breath does language become comprehensible rhythmic expression. In a world full of slogans and catchphrases, Allison Grimaldi Donahue defends the poetological demand of sound over content. The History of Breathing weaves linguistics and poetry, verse and song, meaning and sound into a dense narrative about breathing, rhythm, and the gaps in language that allow words to take on meaning in the first place.In the tradition of such poets as Charles Olsen, Alice Notley, and Sappho, Grimaldi Donahue’s poetry connects the history of breath and language with narratives about the discovery and loss of our own voice.softcover, 64 pp aktion_fiction, 2025 Allison Grimaldi Donahue works in text and performance, exploring modes in which language and text can move between individual and collective experience. She is the author of Body to Mineral and On Endings and translator of Blown Away by vito m. bonito and Self-portrait by Carla Lonzi. She lives in Bologna.

Vocal Inhabitants is a vibrant collection of new, experimental writing and visual art from writers and artists across the globe. The collection is interested in questions of degradation, liminality and companionship. But at its heart, it represents an exploration of that which is lost between speaker and receiver, the decay of thought between the mind and the page, the fraying of relationships between lovers and families and the generation of new, abstract ways of communicating. Though described as an anthology, Vocal Inhabitants is not part of a series, and does not represent an ongoing anthology project, but rather it is a single work created by many voices.edited by Charlie Case & Joe Vaughan  Softcover, 105pp Strange Region, 2025

Introduction by Ione Foreward by Laurie Anderson Illustrations by Aura SatzWhat is the difference between hearing and listening? Does sound have consciousness? Can you imagine listening beyond the edge of your own imagination? In response to the anti-war movements of the 1960s, pioneering musician and composer Pauline Oliveros began to expand the way she made music, experimenting with meditation, movement and activism in her compositions. Fascinated by the role that sound and consciousness play in our daily lives, Oliveros developed a series of Sonic Meditations that would eventually lead to the creation of Deep Listening – a practice for healing and transformation open to all, rooted in her musicianship.  Quantum Listening is a manifesto for listening as activism. Through simple yet profound exercises, Oliveros shows how Deep Listening is the foundation for a radically transformed social matrix: one in which compassion and peace form the basis for our actions in the world. This timely edition brings Oliveros’ futuristic vision – blending technology and spirituality – together with a new Foreword and Introduction by Laurie Anderson and IONE.  Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016) was a renowned American composer and performer known for conceiving a unique, meditative, improvisatory approach to music called ‘Deep Listening’®. A central figure in the development of post-war experimental and electronic music, Oliveros was the recipient of four Honorary Doctorates and many awards, including the William Schuman Award for Lifetime Achievement, Columbia University, NY; The Giga-Hertz Award for Lifetime Achievement in Electronic Music from ZKM, Center for Art and Media, Germany and The John Cage Award from from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts. During her lifetime, Oliveros was Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College. Laurie Anderson is one of America’s most renowned – and daring – creative pioneers. Known primarily for her multimedia presentations, she has cast herself in roles as varied as visual artist, composer, poet, photographer, filmmaker, electronics whiz, vocalist and instrumentalist.IONE is an author, playwright, director and an improvising text-sound artist. In addition to multiple performances internationally, she has created numerous large music theater works with her creative partner and spouse, the composer Pauline Oliveros. IONE’s memoir, Pride of Family; Four Generations of American Women of Color, was a New York Times Notable Book on its publication. She was Artistic Director of Deep Listening Institute, Ltd for 15 years and is currently a Deep Listening Consultant at the Center for Deep Listening, Troy, NY. As Founding Director of The Ministry of Maåt, IONE received the 2019 Arts Mid Hudson Individual Artists Award and a Certificate of Merit from the General Assembly of the State of New York, and was a member of the Kingston Arts Commission for several years. IONE’s most recent opera TOUCH, with composer Karen Power, premiered at Irish National Opera in 2021.Aura Satz’s work encompasses film, sound, performance and sculpture. Her work centres on the trope of ventriloquism in order to conceptualise a distributed, expanded and shared notion of voice. Works are made in conversation and use dialogue as both method and subject matter. She has long-standing interest in compositional practices, in particular those of women in electronic and electroacoustic music, under the umbrella titles of ‘She Recalibrates’, manifesting as a series of film and sound portraits, as well as drawings. She has also made a body of work centred on various sound technologies in order to explore notation systems, code and encryption, and ways in which these might resist standardisation, generating new soundscapes, and in turn new forms of listening and attending to the other.

Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple demand: dignity for the Palestinian.“Mohammed El-Kurd has written a new Discourse on Colonialism for the twenty-first century.”―Robin D. G. Kelley   Paperback, 265pp Haymarket Books, February 2025

Art students Gina Birch and Ana da Silva formed The Raincoats in 1977. Since the release of their seminal early records, the 'godmothers of grunge' have been revered by punk, queer, feminist and indie pop artists alike. The Raincoats reimagined the nature of experimental music and DIY design and went on to inspire Sonic Youth, Nirvana, and an entire generation of Riot Grrrl and queercore musicians.Shouting Out Loud: Lives of the Raincoats tells their astonishing story in three extraordinary lives. In The Raincoats' first life, they recorded three full-length albums now regarded as classics and were the first punk band to play behind the Iron Curtain in Warsaw. Nearly a decade later in 1992, the band's second life took off when Kurt Cobain's love of the band catalysed their renaissance.In 2001, The Raincoats emerged from their five-year hiatus into their third and ongoing iteration marked by performances in art museums such as New York's MoMA, the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and London's National Portrait Gallery. The Raincoats have and continue to be a singular phenomenon and influence for so many.Featuring exclusive interviews and never-before-seen images from The Raincoats' archive, Shouting Out Loud is the ultimate, authorised biography of this pioneering group of women - and the must-have account of a legendary band that holds a vital place in twentieth and twenty-first century sonic history.Foreword by Greil Marcus  Hardback, 400pp White Rabbit, July 2025

Delirious Verse presents the first English translation of a talk given by Italian poet Amelia Rosselli in the early 1980s, in which she read aloud from and expanded upon her seminal essay “Metrical Spaces.” Drawing on her intensive literary and musical studies, and influenced by her trilingual upbringing as a refugee from fascist Italy, Rosselli conceptualizes a new kind of poetic form: a graphic-prosodic “time-space” capable of containing “all possible imaginable rhythms.”The book includes a new translation of “Metrical Spaces” by Jennifer Scappettone and an afterword by Andrea di Serego Alighieri.Staplebound, 68pp The Last Books, May 2025 No. 7 in The Yellow Papers

Softcover, 120pp BFI Film Classics, May 2025   Elena Gorfinkel is Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s (2017); co-author with John David Rhodes of The Prop, (2025); and co-editor of Taking Place: Location & the Moving Image (2011), and Global Cinema Networks (2018).Actor-turned-writer/director Barbara Loden's only feature film, Wanda (1970), tells the story of an alienated working-class woman, Wanda Goronski (played by Loden), who abandons her life as a coal miner's wife and mother, electing instead to drift. Bracing in its realist texture and proto-feminist in its sensibility, it received critical acclaim upon release, winning the Critics' Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1970. Today, Wanda is considered one of the most notable films made by a woman director and a core work of American independent cinema.Elena Gorfinkel's study of this singular film traces Loden's creative process and unconventional approach to filmmaking. Drawing on archival sources, including scripts, interviews, production records, oral history, and previously unseen ephemera, she examines the film's de-dramatised aesthetic, one that rebukes the artifice and “slickness” of Hollywood. Gorfinkel considers Loden's craft in her framing of cinematic time, manipulation of gesture, voice, and posture, narrative ellipsis, and in her use of location and non-professional actors. Providing an account of Wanda's exhibition and reception in the 1970s and after, she traces the film's feminist legacies, and its lasting influence on contemporary filmmakers, artists and writers.

Paperback, 200pp Divided Publishing, Feb 2025Darryl Cook is a cuckold, and that’s exactly how he likes it. He has an inheritance that spares him from work, a manageable and seemingly consequence-free drug habit, and a lovely wife called Mindy who’s generally game for anything—and for as much of it as she can get. But after an accidental overdose and some serious oversharing, Darryl’s world begins to crack up. Tormented by what seems to be the secret truth in sex, and less assured of that secret’s form, Darryl steps into what used to be called real life . . . Darryl is a disarmingly funny and unabashedly intelligent look at a community of people parsing masculinity, marriage, sex (and love) on their own terms.

Softcover, unbound, 200 x 250mm, 44 pp, Risograph printing Edition of 150 Vibrational Semantics/ TEXST, Bergen, 2024as the non-world falls away is set of fragmented poetic compositions, created through iPhone scans of the artists notebook that have then been worked over digitally, testing the boundaries between image and text in a palimpsestic manner

18 pp, risograph printed , edition of 150Vibrational Semantics, 2022DEAR EAR is a fragmentary text, moving through subvocalization, lingual acrobatics, ingressive speaking and rhythmic reading in various experiences of the visualised voice.

staplebound pamphlet Vibrational Semantics, Bergen 2023‘A Tone or Two’ comes in the form of a text score and a melodic voice work. Noticing a shift in her voice in recent years, Thams tracks how within the last decades female voices have lowered 23hz in pitch. Tuning into the shift toward more gender equality, vocal pitch is explored in relation to authority, electability, courage and rhythmicity. With link to online sound work.

Paperback, 120x210mm, 38 pp Veer2 Publication 006, June 2021. 'In Mudchute, the difficult structures of language are carefully treated. Infancy, attachment, ambivalence and loss are disassembled and reconfigured amidst gaunt hedgerows, fuel farm repositories, the bouncy castle and the DLR as Betteridge’s lyric voice navigates the edge of fragmentation. Deeply felt and experimental, apprehensive of and devoted to both the unbearable and the comic aspects of experience and memory, these poems perform the difficult bonds of social life even as they resist them: ‘you cannot live in the house that you are / with everyone’.'  (Helen Charman)'The poems assembled in Mudchute survive the disciplinary function of close reading in demanding and often beautiful ways. They are resistant objects, made to be held in the mouth and turned until the edges of the terms are worn. Across the collection, this Winnicottian regress to 'barest idiom' encounters a forensic vocabulary for ‘all the mute sparkplugs of accreted / emotional and physical violence’ that imprint our lived environments, developmental experiences, and the muddied recesses of generational memory. Torqued between the nuclear family, the experiential group, and the enervated provision of state institutions, the daily work of care becomes at once ‘the poverty of administered / atomized / gapping’ and the intimate horizon of a ‘grazed / lip- / stirred in the face of group kindness.’ It is a horizon we have called communism and reparative reading and family abolition. In Betteridge's work, it is the minimum.' (Fred Carter)     This is part of a series of works organised by Robert Kiely for Veer2, produced and published jointly in the University of Surrey and the CPRC, Birkbeck College.

Veer2 Publication 034, December 2023 Softcover, 13x26cm, 44 pages £1 from the sale of each copy of this book will be donated to Palestine Action's legal defence funds www.palestineaction.org‘Picture a pencil curved, implausibly, parabolically. An implement bending back on itself (core straining) so as to be drawing the surest line, even as its eraser-end is simultaneously rubbing that graphite out. What remains almost never was: mark as memorial to foreclosure. Examined from a certain angle, the un-line flickers in and out of thereness. On registration, it lives, it goes forth. Sub rosa, it knows never to clear its throat. It has learnt to calibrate its signature; it can evade infra-red. Propelling itself through the narrowest channels, it proceeds with resolve, flayingly. Mattar’s And most of all I would miss the shadows of the tree’s own leaves cast upon its trunk by the orange streetlight in the sweet blue darks of spring is taut as writing can be. The tone she makes sound is singular and desperately (gloriously) intent.'- Sarah Hayden‘Piercing and lucid in its exposition of atmospheric violence and total erasure, Mira Mattar gets to the grain of how the languages of selfhood, mediated but also inhibited by the force of the ‘un-universal’, become complicit in forming the sovereign imperative to self-determination, ‘oh arrogant ambition / to transform / you & keep myself / plumed’, through the reproduction of a ‘contested field / of meaning’, one both marked by the lure and ruse of psychic stability as the real fantasy of occupation, and immanent to concrete, unknown modes of personal resistance and collective recovery thread like a ‘rope / in a knot in a line / of knots’, an inherited ‘excess of memory / mostly portal.’ Mattar carefully gleans in its undecidability, given over to moments of precarious decision without ties or duplicity.'- James GoodwinThis is part of a series of works organised by Robert Kiely for Veer2, produced and published jointly in the University of Surrey and the CPRC, Birkbeck College.

with translations by Saskia Vogel Paperback; 130 x 210mm, 248pp; with black-and-white photographs throughout Prototype, London, July 2025In Diary of an Ending, internationally renowned photographer Lina Scheynius expands her artistic vision to prose, offering an unflinching and intimate exploration of heartbreak and self-recovery. Blurring the boundaries between diary and essay, Diary of an Ending explores the break-up of a relationship, combining extracts from Scheynius’s diary – written in Swedish and translated by Saskia Vogel – with reflective essays written in English five years on, exploring ideas about art and photography, sex and passion, the act of diary-making, destructive relationships, motherhood and home. Interspersed with black-and-white photographs, and written with the same unashamed and unfiltered honesty that defines Scheynius’s photography, Diary of an Ending is an intimate hybrid of memoir and autofiction, a meditation on the passage of time and the transformative power of creativity.

A5, 32 pp Veer Publication 101, April 2024  "Astrophil and Stella was published by Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum press in 1999. Bonney had been attending the WF workshop for some time and had been impressed by Cobbing’s various energies. His later statement that he 'loved the way he would focus on the text as material, would blow up the words till they fell apart, become simply marks on the page . . .' illuminates this collection. Here the passionate frustrations of Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence are translated into feverishly-worked grids of improvised spattered charcoal markings. Bonney later moved to a more explicitly revolutionary rhetoric; this text—along with Baudelaire in English (Veer 012)— witnesses a strikingly original response to Cobbing’s practice."

Jean-Christophe Thomas (born 1959), trained at the Paris Conservatory (CNSMP) electroacoustic composition class, is research associate at the Ina-GRM with François Delalande (perceptive analysis in music), in particular in charge of studying approaches in composition. His musicological studies concern acousmatic repertoire. Maison ONA, September 2024 bilingual edition (English / French) Softcover, 184 ppJean-Christophe Thomas analyzes François Bayle's complete work in 52 recurring features (book augmented with 151 sound examples to download). Diabolus in musica offers a guided and commented listening experience through François Bayle's catalog. Augmented with 151 sound files (examples), it can be approached in a non-linear way, through the listening or the concept it illustrates. The 52 thematics are characteristic traits or recurrences in the way he creates, conceives or organizes his materials—making his art unique. One of the major contributors to acousmatic music, François Bayle (born 1932 in Tamatave, Madagascar) strives to promote the GRM and its values, as well as pursuing the development of the acousmonium, a multi-speaker apparatus designed for the performative projection of sounds. As far as his music is concerned, he is known for his vast compositional cycles whose style unites articulation and fluidity, color, and energetic creation.François Bayle studied with Stockhausen and Messiaen. He joined the ORTF Groupe de Musique Concrète in 1960. He later led the group when it became the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in 1966. Most of his compositions are electronic, and his first important work, "Espaces inhabitables" (1967) is suggestive of an imaginary world in which nature is distorted in a dream-like fashion. He later utilized natural and synthetic sounds in his compositions, such as the recorded sounds made in a Lebanese cave. He has stated that his purpose as a composer is to enable the listener to feel the motion and vibration of energy in the universe.