★Blank Forms
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…
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.
Selected Writings and Interviews
The life and work of Maryanne Amacher are as vast as they are as yet unknown. A heterodox and idiosyncratic selection of largely unpublished documents spanning the bandwidth of the still unprocessed contents of the Amacher archive.
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
* 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
* LP on black vinyl, pressed at RTI and housed in a heavy-duty tip-on Stoughton jacket, with insert. * 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. There, he assembled a group of Swedish musicians …
Music for Cello and Humming
Nomadic Australian cellist and composer Judith Hamann presents two collections of her sonic inquiries into shaking and humming. Her CD, Music for Cello and Humming, features two pieces for cello and humming written specifically for Hamann by composers Sarah Hennies and Anthony Pateras alongside Hamann's own "Humming Suite" and "Study for Cello and Humming." Having arisen intuitively from Hamann's investigations into shaking, just intonation, psychoacoustic phenomena, and the voice in relation to…
Shaking Studies
Nomadic Australian cellist and composer Judith Hamann presents two collections of her sonic inquiries into shaking and humming. Her LP, Shaking Studies, is a collection of iterative cello performance that foregrounds shaking as a generative subject. In addition to an arsenal of techniques for registrable shaking, Hamann's conception of the term emphasizes micro and macro pulsing, including tremors, vibrato, wolf tones, and complex partial activity. Hamann begins with a sphygmological reading of …
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.
Fast Edit
Fast Edit is the second LP by Still House Plants, a Glasgow and South London-based three-piece collective made up of Finlay Clark, David Kennedy, and Jessica Hickie-Kallenbach. As artists who started to write music together during their second year at The Glasgow School of Art, Still House Plants emerged from the eclectic scene surrounding Glasgow's Green Door Studio and soon found a home at London's Cafe OTO, where they undertook a six-month residency in 2018. Factor in a semester spent living …
Customer's Copy
**12" pink-hued clear RTI vinyl pressing** Customer’s Copy is the debut LP of contorted cosmic jazz and eccentric minimal electronics by Exotic Sin. The duo of Naima Karlsson and Kenichi Iwasa first came together for a performance celebrating the art and music of Karlsson’s grandparents, Moki and Don Cherry, before continuing as an independent unit that still incorporates some of the Cherrys’ instruments as well as their synergetic integration of music with artistic practice.
Preferring the star…
Unbegrenzt
"Unbegrenzt" is the third in an ongoing series of archival records of the unheard music of Swedish composer Catherine Christer Hennix, co-released by Blank Forms Editions and Empty Editions. It follows "Selected Early Keyboard Works" and "Selections from 100 Models of Hegikan Roku" (named the #1 archival release of 2019 by The Wire), in addition to a two-volume collection of Hennix’s writing titled "Poësy Matters" and "Other Matters".
Solos
Deluxe boxed LP set of Graham Lambkin's first four solo records, including an expansive book featuring essays and unseen photos. LPs included are: "Poem (For Voice & Tape)", "Salmon Run", "Softly Softly Copy Copy" and "Amateur Doubles".