★Blank Forms
Better Do It Now Before You Die Later (Book)
Though his years in the New York free-jazz scene of the sixties cemented his reputation as “one of the most forceful and convincing composers and soloists in his field,” saxophonist Sonny Simmons (1933–2021) was nearly forgotten by the eighties, which found him broke, heavily dependent on drugs and alcohol, and newly separated from his wife and kids. “I played on the streets from 1980 to 1994, 365 days a year,” Simmons tells jazz historian and biographer Marc Chaloin in Better Do It Now Before Y…
Hold Onto I.D.
Recorded from late 1996 through early 1997, Hold Onto I.D., The Shadow Ring’s fourth album, marks the apogee of the trio’s experimental rock epoch—their last record clinging to their factitious bandness before they let all song and structure go awash in sonic malaise for their final run of releases on Swill Radio. The surrealist dreams of City Lights and Put the Music in Its Coffin give way to pseudo-expressionistic lyrics mired in the banality and bleakness of the everyday, set against the back…
Wax-Work Echoes
Wax-Work Echoes, The Shadow Ring’s 1996 album, marks a shift to original material and features Tim Goss in the main lineup. Fusing atmospheric soundscapes and wry lyricism, it captures the band’s restless energy. Out of print for decades, it now returns on vinyl.
Nightclouds + How Do I Know If My Cat Likes Me
From the always remarkable hands of Blank Forms come two new stunning LPs from the Stockholm based composer Ellen Arkbro: “Nightclouds”, comprising five minimalist improvisations for solo organ, and “How do I know if my cat likes me?”, made within a trio comprising Hanne Lippard and Hampus Lindwall, interweaving wry conceptualism and topical humor with poetics, voice, texture, and tone. Each absolutely brilliant and distinct, they stand as some of the most exciting works we've encountered from A…
How Do I Know If My Cat Likes Me
Inspired by minimalistic icon La Monte Young and guitarist Allan Holdsworth, Nightclouds is a powerful collection of jazz pieces for solo pipe organ. Over long improvisation and shorter compositions, Swedish composer and installation artist Ellen Arkbro employs her usually epic chord structures and adds in a more self-reflective tone than previously.
Nightclouds
Inspired by minimalistic icon La Monte Young and guitarist Allan Holdsworth, Nightclouds is a powerful collection of jazz pieces for solo pipe organ. Over long improvisation and shorter compositions, Swedish composer and installation artist Ellen Arkbro employs her usually epic chord structures and adds in a more self-reflective tone than previously.
Organic Music Societies
Archival documents and new writings on the intermedia collaborations of avant-garde jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and textile artist Moki Cherry
Waterfall Horizon
Neo Gibson records, performs, and produces as 7038634357, a project that has been pushing the boundaries of digital composition since 2016. Based in New York City, Gibson's work exists at the intersection of minimalist composition, electronic music, and site-specific performance art. Their unique approach to sound and space has garnered international attention, with performances spanning from underground venues to prestigious experimental music festivals
Blank Forms - Vol. 10: Alien Roots: Éliane Radigue (Book)
A detailed look at the elusive work of a French pioneer of musique concrète and electroacoustic composition Eliane Radigue
Heels In The Aisle
The sophomore effort from Gray/Smith refines their petroleum-based, hard-lullaby sound with a decidedly dusty precision. Formed in the outer-edges of Kings and Richmond counties circa 2020, Gray/Smith is something of an East-coast involution. L. Gray (guitar and vocals) and Rob Smith (drums, guitar and vocals) are both trusty veterans of “band’s bands” like Pigeons, No-Neck Blues Band, Rhyton, and the Suntanama, freewheeling groups known for mining from polyglot sources: rough-hewn folk and the …
Resynthese FAVN
Resynthese FAVN is a ten-CD box set and publication presenting a new realization of Florian Hecker’s 2017 thirteen-channel installation of the same name. First exhibited at Kunsthalle Wien in the exhibition “Halluzination, Perspektive, Synthese,” and elaborating upon ideas first presented in the 2016 project FAVN, the ten works that comprise Resynthese FAVN present iterations of synthetic timbre produced using “…spectral operators, moving between analysis and synthesis, between discriminative an…
Further Selections from the Electric Harpsichord
CD Edition. Rediscovered and compiled for release shortly before her death in November 2023, Further Selections from the Electric Harpsichord presents a never-before-heard recording of composer and artist Catherine Christer Hennix's early magnum opus. Originally debuted in 1976 at the festival Brouwer's Lattice at Stockholm's Moderna Museet, The Electric Harpsichord has steadily mystified fans and students of Western minimalist music for its implacable, transformative qualities, and the long-hel…
Return of the SAD 1024, Vol. I & II
During a 2010 stay in Stockholm, Sweden, Stefan Tcherepnin cold-called the Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) and began making frequent visits to the facility’s Serge Modular, the synthesizer system developed by his uncle. Tcherepnin secured a makeshift residency at the studio, and soon met Anders Enge, a musician and producer associated with the acid techno label Börft. For over a decade, the pair have collaboratively explored the instrument’s outer-limits in the hallowed studio where figures like Knut…
Return of the SAD 1024, Vol. II
During a 2010 stay in Stockholm, Sweden, Stefan Tcherepnin cold-called the Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) and began making frequent visits to the facility’s Serge Modular, the synthesizer system developed by his uncle. Tcherepnin secured a makeshift residency at the studio, and soon met Anders Enge, a musician and producer associated with the acid techno label Börft. For over a decade, the pair have collaboratively explored the instrument’s outer-limits in the hallowed studio where figures like Knut…
Return of the SAD 1024, Vol. I
During a 2010 stay in Stockholm, Sweden, Stefan Tcherepnin cold-called the Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) and began making frequent visits to the facility’s Serge Modular, the synthesizer system developed by his uncle. Tcherepnin secured a makeshift residency at the studio, and soon met Anders Enge, a musician and producer associated with the acid techno label Börft. For over a decade, the pair have collaboratively explored the instrument’s outer-limits in the hallowed studio where figures like Knut…
Groove, Bang And Jive Around
Despite decades of notoriety as one of the “filthiest books in the world,” Steve Cannon’s first and only novel, Groove, Bang and Jive Around, has hardly been read since first being published by the Paris-based Ophelia Press in 1969. Due to its scarcity, the New York Press deemed it “an underground classic of such legendary stature that New York’s black cognoscenti have transmogrified the work into urban myth.” This debut, revised for release by Olympia Press in 1971, cemented Cannon’s place as a…
Cold Drinks, Hot Dreams
LP pressed at RTI. Tip-on jacket printed at Stoughton Printing Co. Atrás del Cosmos have been called Mexico’s first free jazz ensemble. Founded in 1975 by pianist Ana Ruiz, saxophonist Henry West, and percussionist Evry Mann, the trio soon became a central force in Mexico City’s creative arts community, mentoring a generation of improvisers, incorporating a revolving cast of artists into their immersive happenings, and sustaining a scene through their legendary weekly performances at El Galeón t…
Turzets
The latest in a prolific string of solo and collaborative releases by James Rushford, Turzets collects a pair of new works primarily created and recorded last year while the Australian composer-performer was in residence at La Becque, an art center on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. The side-length piece “Fallaway Whisk” explores hesitation in its many forms—reticence of speech, sonic restraint—using live, abstracted translations of text from English to German against a lush and swelling soundscape.…
The Shadow Ring 1992-2002
A comprehensive overview of the work produced by British musicians Graham Lambkin, Darren Harris, and later Tim Goss over the course of a decade, across eleven CDs and a DVD, accompanied by an nearly five-hundred-page book.
Blank Forms 09: Sound Signatures (book)
The penultimate Blank Forms anthology presents new, in-depth interviews with musicians Theo Parrish, Amelia Cuni, Akio Suzuki, and more. At the centerpiece of Blank Forms 09: Sound Signatures is a career-spanning, twenty-hour conversation conducted over four days between producer, remixer, and Detroit house music legend Theo Parrish and veteran music journalist Mike Rubin. They go deep on Parrish's childhood in Chicago's South Side, sculptural training, and collaborations with Moodymann, Rick Wi…