★Blank Forms
Kazuki Tomokawa 1975–1977
Tip! A poet, soothsayer, bicycle race tipster, actor, prolific drinker, self-taught guitarist, and living legend of Japanese sound, Kazuki Tomokawa catapulted into Tokyo’s avant-folk scene in the mid-1970s, forging a sound and sensibility marked by throat-wrenching vocals and searing ennui. Among his musical peers in postwar Japan, Tomokawa distinguished himself as a pioneer of radical individualism. He had “the personality of a hydrogen bomb”—as the notorious ultraleft band the Brain Police on…
Finally, His First Album
Tip! At the tender age of twenty-five, while he was working part-time at an Italian restaurant in Tokyo’s Kamata district, Kazuki Tomokawa released his debut record, fittingly titled Finally, His First Album. While he had already penned hundreds of songs, including his first single “Try Saying You’re Alive!,” written on a long train ride past fields and rice paddies, it was this recording that introduced Japan to one of its most unique musicians of the postwar era. Each track, as record label …
Straight from the Throat
Tip! In the 1970s, Kazuki Tomokawa catapulted into Tokyo’s avant-garde scene with his cathartic and utterly electrifying performances. Straight from the Throat, Tomokawa’s second album, released in July 1976 by Harvest Records, finds the musician in his truest form: as the “screaming philosopher” he would come to be called—cynical but fair, cheeky and melancholic, and looking at the world with truth-seeking eyes.
In Straight from the Throat, Tomokawa shrieks and shouts and wallows with ritualis…
Ground: Five Mechanic Convention Streams
The final album released by the composer-performer Jerry Hunt before his death, Ground: Five Mechanic Convention Streams is a rare and foundational audio document of Hunt’s compositional process. The record collects five pieces from the artist’s “Ground” series, translating his characteristically variable and spatial scores into “recorded fixtures of activity using mechanic musical instrument arrays,” to eerie and mesmerizing results. Originally released by experimental label OODiscs in 1992, it…
Blank Forms 08: Transmission from the Pleroma (Book)
Jerry Hunt (1943–1993) has been described as a shamanic figure with the look of a Central Texas meat inspector. One of the most compelling composers in the world of late twentieth-century new music, he made work that combined video synthesis, installation art, and early computers with rough-hewn sculptures, scores drawn from celestial alphabets, and homemade electronics activated by his signature wands and impassioned gestures. Hunt lived his entire life in Texas, eventually settling in a house …
Amateur Doubles
Taped largely in a Honda Civic, Amateur Doubles (Kye, 2011) is a portrait of an oft-overlooked domestic stage: the car. Graham Lambkin captures the sounds of a family in-motion as they fiddle with windows, play with toys, bicker, pass traffic, and listen, as the song titles note, to French prog artists Besombes/Rizet and Philippe Grancher. While the set-up at first appears simple -- a car ride taken by the artist and his family through upstate New York -- Lambkin subtly and slyly manipulates the…
Poem (For Voice & Tape)
"I made the basic recordings of Tim Goss's voice during a recent return trip to England. Despite some initial reservations Tim ended up giving an animated and robust reading, drawn exclusively from work of his own creation. These tapes were then transported back to Poughkeepsie, NY, where the project was teased to completion." (Original LP sleeve notes)
Softly Softly Copy Copy
A study in anticipation, Softly Softly Copy Copy (Kye, 2009) repurposes the expectant rumblings of an audience-in-waiting, lifted by Graham Lambkin from various concert recordings of the German kosmische band Tangerine Dream. These bootlegged clips provide a skeleton for various sonic scraps and interludes—including distorted and abandoned fragments from Lambkin’s archive, new recordings on guitar and violin by Austin Argentieri and Samara Lubelski, respectively—that, together, form a compositio…
Blank Forms, Vol. 7: The Cowboy’s Dreams of Home
Edited by Lawrence Kumpf and Joe Bucciero with contributions from Angel Bat Dawid, Joe Bucciero, Charles Curtis, René Daumal, Thulani Davis, Anthony Elms, Ciarán Finlayson, Jessica Hagedorn, Judith Hamann, Sarah Hennies, Louise Landes Levi, Alan Licht, and Tashi Wada. The Cowboy’s Dreams of Home, the seventh Blank Forms anthology, takes its name from a psychedelic Wild West reverie of Texan singer-songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen. This volume privileges new texts including a retrospectiv…
Partners: A Biography of Jerry Hunt
Jerry Hunt (1943–93) was among the most eccentric figures in the world of new music. A frenetic orator, occultist and engineering consultant, his works from the 1970s through the early ’90s made use of readymade sculptures, medical technology, arcane talismans and all manner of homemade electronic implements to form confrontational recordings and enigmatic, powerful performances. Tracing Hunt’s life across his home state’s major cities to a self-built house in rural Van Zandt County, this memoir…
Try Saying You're Alive!
A memoir by Kawasaki-based writer and musician Kazuki Tomokawa (b. 1950), Try Saying You're Alive! offers a semi-fictionalized account of the vibrant Tokyo underground that he has been at the center of since the 1970s. Recounting sixty years in the life of this "screaming philosopher." Try Saying You're Alive! traces Tomokawa's beginnings in the Akita Prefecture as a "runaway toddler," his adolescent basketball career, and his wanderings as a day laborer, gambler, painter, actor, drinker, and av…
Songs from the Shore
In Japanese folklore, Afuma indicates a time of day marked by spiritual or mysterious encounter. In Latin, one who inhales. Together as Afuma, Stefan Tcherepnin, and Taketo Shimada breathe sepulchral energies into the brooding, cosmic fringes of guitar-based song vernacular. Tcherepnin’s baritone and Shimada’s lap steel guitar intertwine, smearing across world’s-end horizons that propel Tcherepnin’s ragged, foreboding vocal delivery and its lyrical portents of departure, of life’s vessel unmoore…
Organic Music Theatre - Festival de jazz de Chateauvallon 1972
* 2xLP on black vinyl, pressed at RTI and housed in a heavy-duty tip-on gatefold Stoughton jacket. * In the late 1960s, the American trumpet player and free jazz pioneer Don Cherry (1936–1995) and the Swedish visual artist and designer Moki Cherry (1943–2009) began a collaboration that imagined an alternative space for creative music, most succinctly expressed in Moki’s aphorism “the stage is home and home is a stage.” By 1972, they had given name to a concept that united Don’s music, Moki’s art…
The Summer House Sessions
* 2xCD set in jewel case, with slipcase and OBI strip. Includes bonus rehearsal material from The Summer House Sessions, absent from the vinyl edition. * In 1968, Don Cherry had already established himself as one of the leading voices of the avant-garde. Having pioneered free jazz as a member of Ornette Coleman’s classic quartet, and with a high profile collaboration with John Coltrane under his belt, the globetrotting jazz trumpeter settled in Sweden with his partner Moki and her daughter Neneh…
Nothing but the Music
The sounds of late '70s and '80s east coast avant-garde jazz, soul, and punk rock are well documented, but in Nothing but the Music Thulani Davis gives us something beyond, delivering a collection of synesthetic, transportive documentary poems that breathe anecdotal and impressionistic life into a sonic-social history about which most can only speculate. Davis' verse takes free flight with its muses, scatting and leaping off the page and the shoulders of the musicians, nightclubs, and choreograp…
Axis/Another Revolvable Thing
Axis / Another Revolvable Thing is the second installment of Blank Forms’ archival reissues of the music of Japan’s eternal revolutionary Masayuki Takayanagi, following April Is the Cruellest Month, a 1975 studio record by his New Direction Unit.
Axis/Another Revolvable Thing 2
Axis / Another Revolvable Thing is the second installment of Blank Forms’ archival reissues of the music of Japan’s eternal revolutionary Masayuki Takayanagi, following April Is the Cruellest Month, a 1975 studio record by his New Direction Unit.
Axis/Another Revolvable Thing 1
Axis / Another Revolvable Thing is the second installment of Blank Forms’ archival reissues of the music of Japan’s eternal revolutionary Masayuki Takayanagi, following April Is the Cruellest Month, a 1975 studio record by his New Direction Unit.
Blank Forms - Vol. 5: Aspirations of Madness
Edited by Lawrence Kumpf with Joe Bucciero. Contributors and featured artists include Masayuki Takayanagi, Louise Landes Levi, Joseph Jarman, Catherine Christer Hennix, Charles Stein, Henry Orlov, Maryanne Amacher, Alan Cummings, Bill Dietz, Peter Kastakis, Art Lange, Leo Svirsky, Satoru Obara, and Tomoyuki Chida.Aspirations of Madness, Blank Forms’ fifth collection of archival, unpublished, or newly translated texts, takes its title from a series of interviews with Japanese free jazz pioneer Ma…