Co-Existence
** Hand numbered edition of 250. Silscreened see-trough cover ** Co-Existence is a piece composed by sound artist Shigeru Ishihara (Dj Scotch Egg/Scotch Rolex) during his artistic residency at MAO, Turin's Museum of Asian Art, inspired by the temporary exhibition Buddha10 - A Fragmented Display on Buddhist Visual Evolution curated by Davide Quadrio and Laura Vigo held at that time at the museum. The artist acoustically explored the natural reverberations that characterize the museum and an anci…
Stolen Scars
The five-channel sound installation "Stolen Scars" by Eiki Mori was exhibited in the "Takamatsu Contemporary Art Annual vol.10 There Is No Boundaries Here./?” at the Takamatsu Art Museum from February 11 to March 21, 2022. And this is the documentary soundtrack of that work.
“There is a boy who has been deeply hurt, heartbroken and has not recover yet. You can’t talk to him or rub his back. Instead, you can only ring this bell for him.”
When Mori created "Stolen Scars,” he first sent a handbell …
Three Glasses
Composed by Takahiro Kawaguchi. Performed by Shinjiro Yamaguchi, Satoshi Kanda, Kanako Kawaguchi and Takahiro Kawaguchi. Droplets of water are set to drip from three infusion containers suspended from the ceiling, each at a different speed. Each of the three players produce sound by rubbing with their fingers a wine glass that catches the droplets from one of the containers, with the scale changing according to the amount of water that accumulates. The first track documents this process for te…
JST: Solar Noon, Kyotango: Summer Solstice, Akashi: Winter Solstice
Solar noon is the time when the Sun appears to contact the local celestial meridian. This is when the Sun reaches its apparent highest point in the sky, at 12 noon apparent solar time. *However the local or clock time of solar noon depends on the longitude and date. The summer solstice is the day with the longest period of daylight of the year. The winter solstice is the day with the shortest period of daylight of the year. Time and Space, UTC and JST, North and South, East and West, Left and R…
Curtis Cuffie (Book)
Curtis Cuffie (1955–2002) was an artist who lived and worked in and around the East Village from the mid-1980s until his untimely death in the early 2000s. He moved to New York from Hartsville, South Carolina, as a teenager and lived unhoused for long stretches of his adult life. Cuffie found local notoriety for the way he adorned the streets of downtown New York, collecting what the city provided, often sifting trash to stage on-the-spot sculptures along the Bowery and Cooper Square. His arrang…
Tokyo Jazz Joints (Book)
Big Tip! Japanese jazz bars and coffee shops are insular worlds where time ceases to exist, removed from the speed and chaos of the modern urban landscape. Tokyo Jazz Joints is a visual chronicle of this unique culture that captures the transient beauty of these spaces. Established in 2015 to document Tokyo’s myriad »jazu kissa«, the project has gradually expanded to cover the whole of Japan. These dedicated jazz listening spaces are slowly vanishing in the face of changing trends, ageing custom…
Japanoise Music at the Edge of Circulation (Book)
*2023 stock* Noise, an underground music made through an amalgam of feedback, distortion, and electronic effects, first emerged as a genre in the 1980s, circulating on cassette tapes traded between fans in Japan, Europe, and North America. With its cultivated obscurity, ear-shattering sound, and over-the-top performances, Noise has captured the imagination of a small but passionate transnational audience. For its scattered listeners, Noise always seems to be new and to come from somewhere else: …
Shibboleth
CD+Book, art edition Original sound installation by Eiki Mori (born 1976 in Ishikawa, Japan). A horn speaker, used to send small sounds far away, will emit whispers of various voices that read Mori’s poems in multiple languages. In the galley space, these voices shall sound nostalgic but at the same time be felt as if they are heard for the first-time, coming from somewhere around the globe. The 15 shibboleths written down for this installation do not really stand for symbolic things or events…
Early Sound Installations
In the early 1980s, several artists such as Satoshi Ashikawa and Hiroshi Yoshimura, who were pioneers during the early days of Japanese sound art, began to display their works at exhibitions. Ashikawa, who passed away at the young at the age of 30, worked at Art Vivant, a store affiliated with the Seibu Museum of Art in Tokyo, and was one of the first to introduce materials and records of environmental and experimental music from outside of Japan. Artists began coming to Art Vivant to see Ashika…
The Cat & Bells Club
140g black vinyl pressed at RTI. Insert & jacket printed at Stoughton Printing Co. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu * In 1992, under the guise of the Cat & Bells Club, eighteen-year-old Cheriton residents Graham Lambkin and Darren Harris self-released three tapes—two yellow cassettes and one pink—documenting their earliest musical efforts at S.H.P. studios (Lambkin’s bedroom in his parents’ house). The lowest of all lo-fi recordings, these tracks were laid down live, directly into a boombox with no o…
Toshi Ichiyanagi, A Pianist
Limited 80 copies. V.A “Toshi Ichiyanagi, A Pianist” (special edition) CD+CDR
1_Table tennis performance at Katsumi Asaba Exhibition / 2009 / 13’57”Influenced by Asaba, who even coached a Japanese national team player, Ichiyanagi is also known as a very good table tennis player. A ping-pong table was also brought to the event and a demonstration was held before Ichiyanagi's performance. A contact microphone was attached to the ping-pong table where audience members, as well as Ichiyanagi, played…
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 …
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…
Around the Plywood
**300 copies** Document of salad, who performed BGM and sound performance for the exhibition "new lagoon in Hokan-Cho, Okayama " curated by Ayako Tsutsumi (edition.nord).
Salad is a music team consisting of Masami Baba (Based in Hyogo) and Nagai Tsume (Based in Niigata). Ayako commissioned Nagai Tsume to compose the BGM for the exhibition. Masami Baba is a sound artist who has been attracting Ayako's attention for some time.This work is a reconstruction based on the sound of their first performa…
Time: 18:33_19:43 Date: 06 Aug 2015 Latitude/Longitude: 34°23'47.8"N 132°28'16.3"E
**300 copies** This work was recorded on 6 August 2015, 70 years after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, in a certain place in Hiroshima-city. The work consists of the following three sound sources.
-70-minute field recording, including sunset time, at Hiroshima-City, on August 6, 2015.-The sound source that converted VLF waves into audio at times the same as the above.-The sound source that converted ELF waves into audio at times the same as the above.
A motion appears as a function of …
Wetland
**300 copies. The leaves assembled on the CD package were collected around the pond where the recording was made.** As in Eisuke Yanagisawa's own words: I set the recorder on the shore and collected it the following day. At midnight, the growling of animals (which turned out to be the sound of bullfrogs, an alien species) reverberated around the pond. Mizorogaike, which consists of a pond and a wetland, is located on the northern edge of the Kyoto Basin. Many aquatic plants, insects, fish, wild …
Selected Graphic Scores
Edition of 50 copies, Special Edition, Carboard box with 17 sheets Graphic Scores. This edition is published on the occasion of Alan Courtis’s exhibition, “Graphic Scores” on March 2-10, 2018.