★Blank Forms
Larynx (LP)
2xLP pressed at RTI inside a tip-on jacket printed at Stoughton. Lacquer cut directly from reel-to-reel by Paul Gold. Recorded in Lary 7’s legendary apartment studio Plastikville over nearly a decade, Larynx is the first full-length retrospective of the East Village icon’s hybrid music and engineering practice. The record mobilizes 7’s array of homemade instruments, which he ‘frankensteins’ together from offcast and outmoded bits of technology. An ode to the long-lost Canal Street junk shops h…
May 99
Tip! Black vinyl, with silkscreen and insert. In the spring of 1999, Charles Curtis, Alan Licht, and Dean Roberts brought an unconventional mix of drone, improvisation, and experimental rock on an eleven-stop tour of Europe. The concept was straightforward, yet novel: each night, they would improvise a single piece while sustained sine waves played for the duration of the concert. May 99, culled from three shorter pieces recorded for a radio program at Amsterdam’s VPRO near the end of the tour, …
A Strange Celestial Road (Book, Hardcover)
In this memoir, Harlem-born trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah recounts decades of national and international touring with the Sun Ra Arkestra and charts the rise of New York loft jazz scene, offering a fascinating portrait of advanced music in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan from the 1970s through the 1990s.
Blue in Green (Book)
Hardcover, cloth binding, dust jacket The latest work from the veteran novelist called “one hell of a writer” by James Baldwin, “wonderfully wry” by Donald Barthelme, and a “writer’s writer” by Ishmael Reed, Blue in Green narrates one evening in August 1959, when, only eight days after the release of his landmark album Kind of Blue, Miles Davis is assaulted by a member of New York City Police Department outside of Birdland. In the aftermath of Davis’s brief stint in custody, we enter the straine…
New Sense of Hearing
Tip! CD Edition. Available from Blank Forms for the first time since its original 1980 release on ALM-Uranoia, New Sense of Hearing documents a collaboration between Takehisa Kosugi and Akio Suzuki, two luminaries of Japanese experimental music in the lineage of Fluxus. Blank Forms’s high-quality reissue of the sought-after, long out of print LP, is produced by musician-artist Aki Onda and mastered from the original tapes recorded on April 2, 1979, at Tokyo’s Aeolian Hall.
Described by Suzuki …
Irida Records: Hybrid Musics from Texas and Beyond, 1979–1986
An incredible set of vinyl reissues explores the unfolding sonic fiction of Texan composer Jerry Hunt and others affiliated with his Irida label.
Ceramics
Following last year's presentation of Tori Kudo's ceramics at our Brooklyn gallery space, Blank Forms publishes the exhibition's accompanying limited-edition catalog. With images captured on film by musician and photographer Lary 7, Tori Kudo: Ceramics documents the work displayed in the artist's first exhibition in the United States. Designed by Alec Mapes-Frances and available exclusively at Blank Forms, this hardcover art book features thirty color photographs of the vessels with Kudo's comme…
The Cricket: Black Music in Evolution, 1968–69
A rare document of the 1960s Black Arts Movement featuring Albert Ayler, Amiri Baraka, Milford Graves, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, and many more, The Cricket fostered critical and political dialogue for Black musicians and writers. Edited by poets and writers Amiri Baraka, A.B. Spellman, and Larry Neal between 1968 and 1969 and published by Baraka's New Jersey–based Jihad productions shortly after the time of the Newark Riots, this experimental music magazine ran poetry, position papers, and gossip al…
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…
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 …
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…
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…
Common Tones: Selected Interviews with Artists and Musicians 1995–2020
The collection of previously unpublished interviews and extended versions of Alan Licht's famous conversations with figures in the American art and music scene.
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…
The Wolf Has Come Down From The North
** 2021 stock ** This record of absurd, delirious sound poetry, drawn primarily from the voices of Graham Lambkin and Joe McPhee, marks their first vinyl release as a duo. It was published in 2018 in an edition of 270 regular copies and 30 copies with handmade art.
Joe McPhee has been a deeply emotional composer, improviser, and multi-instrumentalist since his emergence on the creative jazz and new music scenes in the late 60s. Inspired by the music of Albert Ayler, he taught himself the saxopho…
Organic Music Theatre - Festival de jazz de Chateauvallon 1972
* 2xCD set in jewel case, with slipcase and OBI strip. * 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, and their family life in rural Tagårp, Swe…