John-Robin Bold

Coming up at Verdurin: Room Tone with Scanner A critical listening session with Robin Rimbaud and Tim Rutherford-Johnson. 📅 20 November, 7pm 📍 Verdurin, Hoxton 🎟️ verdur.in/event/scanner-room… @robinrimbaud, also known as Scanner, has been a fixture of British electronic music since the early 1990s. To launch Verdurin’s new series of critical listening sessions, he presents his album 'Fibolae', with a response from music writer Tim Rutherford-Johnson. Fibolae occupies a special place in Rimbaud’s discography. The album advances his experimentation with a variety of equipment, instruments, and styles that has characterised his output for over three decades.  ROOM TONE Room Tone is a series of public critical listening sessions convened by @JohnRobinBold. Each event presents a recent musical work — a composition or album — in the presence of the artist, accompanied by a response from a critic. Room Tone invites the audience to share their listening experience and explore what defines contemporary musical practices. Video: Scanner, Spirit Cluster, from Fibolae, by @avonhausswolff.

Continuing the releases from Verdurin's event archive, here's my conversation with Philip Cunliffe @thephilippics on "The National Interest", recorded in July 2025. verdur.in/event/the-national… To keep getting these, subscribe to the Verdurin podcast! Many thanks to John-Robin Bold for editing the recordings. (Get the book: verdur.in/store/the-national…) The peak of globalization is behind us, and not merely due to the Trump administration’s trade and foreign policies. With states being forced anew to earn their position in the international order, a new debate about the meaning of their national interest is urgently needed. The concept of ‘national interest’, however, is conspicuous from public life by its absence. All too often, the question is seen as parochial. Even political leaders, more used to making their case to the world at large than to their fellow citizens, treat the question of the national interest as an embarrassment.In "The National Interest", Philip Cunliffe suggests that states will not be able to rise to present challenges without the legitimacy conferred by the pursuit of the national interest.

This exciting series of public listening and critique is launching in three week!

Coming up at Verdurin: Room Tone with Scanner A critical listening session with @robinrimbaud and Tim Rutherford-Johnson. 📅 20 November, 7pm 📍 Verdurin, Hoxton 🎟️ verdur.in/event/scanner-room… Room Tone is a series of public critical listening sessions convened by @JohnRobinBold . Each event presents a recent musical work — a composition or album — in the presence of the artist, accompanied by a response from a critic. Room Tone invites the audience to share their listening experience and explore what defines contemporary musical practices. Robin Rimbaud, also known as Scanner, has been a fixture of British electronic music since the early 1990s. To launch Verdurin’s new series of critical listening sessions, he presents his album 'Fibolae', with a response from music writer Tim Rutherford-Johnson. Fibolae occupies a special place in Rimbaud’s discography. The album advances his experimentation with a variety of equipment, instruments, and styles that has characterised his output for over three decades.

Very excited to launch a new series of critical listening sessions convened by @JohnRobinBold — starting with Scanner and Tim Rutherford-Johnson.

The idea of progress is one of the animating concepts of Western civilisation. It permeates our understanding of history and shapes the way we imagine the future. From Marxism and neoliberalism to today’s identity politics, progress offers a framework of knowledge and confidence: an assurance that things can get better and a justification for our desires. What determines whether the ideas of progress give rise to, well, progress, or merely the substitution of the old? In June 2025, Verdurin convened a conversation between author of "The Progress Trap" @BenCobley, Spiked magazine’s deputy editor @FraserMyers, and environmental philosopher and former Extinction Rebellion spokesman @GreenRupertRead. Listen on the Verdurin podcast: verdur.in/event/progressive-…

The anxieties around the decline of reading and literacy paradoxically give rise to outsized fantasies of the power of reading. In this, the final part of "Out of Print", Edmund King @ghostofchristo1 reflects on bibliotherapy and some of the symposium's highlights. As humanists feel increasingly under threat in the institutions, they attribute to reading (particularly the reading of fiction) miraculous and healing powers. Audio now online: verdur.in/event/out-of-print…

Does the devaluing of literacy coincide with a devaluing of human minds, experience, and relations, a devaluing expressed in the dominant culture of technicist materialism? In this, the fourth part of "Out of Print" — Verdurin's symposium on literacy held in June 2026 and organised with Edmund King — Nick Hostettler explores how the personal inner conflicts experienced by teachers and students caught up in the deepening corporatisation of schools and universities can be translated into resources for defending the truly human. Audio now online: verdur.in/event/out-of-print… @ghostofchristo1

What if the problem of literacy is not its decline, but rather our hyper-literate state? The written word has become a bulwark against experience, with the reading of social media posts or Substack essays is at best a distraction. In this, the third part of "Out of Print" — Verdurin's symposium on literacy held in June 2026 and organised with Edmund King — Kit Wilson explores the confusion of the ‘map’ with the ‘territory’ that occludes access to an understanding of things outside of language itself. Audio now online: verdur.in/event/out-of-print… @ghostofchristo1 @kitwilsonwriter

Concerns about the technologically fuelled decline of literacy overlook that reading and writing have always been technological. From chisels to smart pens, paraphernalia already always mediate the written word. Alison M. Brady extends Vilém Flusser challenge in this second part of "Out of Print", Verdurin's symposium on literacy held in June 2026 and organised with Edmund King. Audio now online: verdur.in/event/out-of-print… @ghostofchristo1