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BF 008CD
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$15.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 6/21/2019
Masayuki "Jojo" Takayanagi (1932 - 1991) was a maverick Japanese guitarist, a revolutionary spirit whose oeuvre embodied the radical political movements of late '60s Japan. Having cut his teeth as an accomplished Lennie Tristano disciple playing cool jazz in the late '50s, Takayanagi had his mind blown by the Chicago Transit Authority's "free form guitar" in 1969 and promptly turned his back on the jazz scene by which he was beloved. Takayanagi had found a new direction, an annihilation of jazz and its associated idolatry of hegemonic American culture. Aiming his virtuoso chops towards the stratosphere, Takayanagi dedicated himself to the art of the freakout, laying waste to tradition left and right, most notably via the all-out assault of his aptly-named New Direction For The Arts (later, New Direction Unit) and collaborations with like-minded outsider saxophonist Kaoru Abe. His innovations on the instrument parallel those of Sonny Sharrock and Derek Bailey and paved the way for the Japanese necromancy of Keiji Haino and Otomo Yoshihide, but even at its most limitless hurdling Takayanagi's playing is propelled by the dexterous grasp of his foundations, to which he paid tribute with elegant takes on flamenco and Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman." Culled from 1975 sessions by the New Direction Unit, April Is The Cruellest Month was originally slated for release on ESP-Disk before the label's untimely demise that year. Part of the period of Takayanagi's career which he termed "non-section music," one can only imagine how its unholy racket might have altered an international understanding of Japanese noise. On "We Have Existed" and "What Have We Given?", the classic lineup of Takayanagi with Kenji Mori (alto sax, flute, bass clarinet), Nobuyoshi Ino (bass, cello), and Hiroshi Yamazaki (percussion) prove that free improvisation was thriving well beyond western Europe with a set of dilapidated, spacious clanging, Takayanagi's squalling feedback and Mori's Eric Dolphy moves undulating atop the joyous clamor. The cataclysmic "My Friend, Blood Shaking My Heart" is another story altogether. Infernal sheets of contorted sound find the berserk instrumentalists hopelessly entangled as they urge the explosion deeper and deeper into ecstatic oblivion. Rivaled in intensity only by John Coltrane's The Olatunji Concert (1967), Peter Brötzmann's Machine Gun (1968), and Dave Burrell's Echo (1969), April Is The Cruellest Month deservedly sees the light of day on the vinyl format for which it was originally conceived, marking the first issue of Takayanagi's music outside of Japan.
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BF 008LP
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$29.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 6/21/2019
Masayuki "Jojo" Takayanagi (1932 - 1991) was a maverick Japanese guitarist, a revolutionary spirit whose oeuvre embodied the radical political movements of late '60s Japan. Having cut his teeth as an accomplished Lennie Tristano disciple playing cool jazz in the late '50s, Takayanagi had his mind blown by the Chicago Transit Authority's "free form guitar" in 1969 and promptly turned his back on the jazz scene by which he was beloved. Takayanagi had found a new direction, an annihilation of jazz and its associated idolatry of hegemonic American culture. Aiming his virtuoso chops towards the stratosphere, Takayanagi dedicated himself to the art of the freakout, laying waste to tradition left and right, most notably via the all-out assault of his aptly-named New Direction For The Arts (later, New Direction Unit) and collaborations with like-minded outsider saxophonist Kaoru Abe. His innovations on the instrument parallel those of Sonny Sharrock and Derek Bailey and paved the way for the Japanese necromancy of Keiji Haino and Otomo Yoshihide, but even at its most limitless hurdling Takayanagi's playing is propelled by the dexterous grasp of his foundations, to which he paid tribute with elegant takes on flamenco and Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman." Culled from 1975 sessions by the New Direction Unit, April Is The Cruellest Month was originally slated for release on ESP-Disk before the label's untimely demise that year. Part of the period of Takayanagi's career which he termed "non-section music," one can only imagine how its unholy racket might have altered an international understanding of Japanese noise. On "We Have Existed" and "What Have We Given?", the classic lineup of Takayanagi with Kenji Mori (alto sax, flute, bass clarinet), Nobuyoshi Ino (bass, cello), and Hiroshi Yamazaki (percussion) prove that free improvisation was thriving well beyond western Europe with a set of dilapidated, spacious clanging, Takayanagi's squalling feedback and Mori's Eric Dolphy moves undulating atop the joyous clamor. The cataclysmic "My Friend, Blood Shaking My Heart" is another story altogether. Infernal sheets of contorted sound find the berserk instrumentalists hopelessly entangled as they urge the explosion deeper and deeper into ecstatic oblivion. Rivaled in intensity only by John Coltrane's The Olatunji Concert (1967), Peter Brötzmann's Machine Gun (1968), and Dave Burrell's Echo (1969), April Is The Cruellest Month deservedly sees the light of day on the vinyl format for which it was originally conceived, marking the first issue of Takayanagi's music outside of Japan.
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BF 005LP
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LP version. The first time Maryanne Amacher's music has ever been available on vinyl. Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009) was a composer of large-scale fixed-duration sound installations and a highly original thinker in the areas of perception, sound spatialization, creative intelligence, and aural architecture. She is frequently cited as a pioneer of what has come to be called "sound art", although her thought and creative practice consistently challenge key assumptions about the capacities and limitations of the genre. Amacher's work anticipates some of the most important developments in network culture, media arts, acoustic ecology, and sound studies, yet due to its expansive interdisciplinary nature, it has rarely been documented. Following two CDs for Tzadik and her inclusion in the monumental collection OHM: The Early Gurus Of Electronic Music (1948-1980), this publication of Amacher's 1991 piece Petra marks her first commercially available instrumental work. Petra was originally commissioned for the ICSM World Music Days in Boswil, Switzerland. Written for two pianos, the piece is a unique example of Amacher's late work, a direct extension of her working methodologies for electronic composition taken into an acoustic realm that alludes to the music of Giacinto Scelsi and Galina Ustvolskaya. Petra is a sweeping, durational work based on both Amacher's impressions of the church at Boswil and science-fiction writer Greg Bear's short story of the same name, in which gargoyles come to life and breed with humans in a post-apocalyptic Notre Dame. This solemn interpretation of Petra was recorded at its 2017 American premiere at New York's St. Peter's Episcopal Church with pianists Marianne Schroeder, who originally performed the piece alongside Amacher in 1991, and Stefan Tcherepnin, who performed it alongside Schroeder in 2012 at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. Weighing tranquilizing passages of glacially-paced serenity against stretches of dilapidated, jagged dissonance, the recording illuminates a crucial node in the constellation of Amacher's enigmatic oeuvre. Artistic director of the Giacinto Scelsi Festival in Basel, Marianne Schroeder is a Swiss composer and pianist specializing in the interpretation of New Music. She has collaborated with and premiered work by John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Dieter Schnebel, Anthony Braxton, Morton Feldman, Pauline Oliveros and Giacinto Scelsi, with whom she studied. She is currently a professor at Hochschule der Künste Bern. Stefan Tcherepnin is an American electronic music performer, contemporary artist, and composer in fourth generation, continuing the family heritage of his great-grandfather Nicholas, grandfather Alexander, and father Ivan Tcherepnin.
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CD
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BF 005CD
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Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009) was a composer of large-scale fixed-duration sound installations and a highly original thinker in the areas of perception, sound spatialization, creative intelligence, and aural architecture. She is frequently cited as a pioneer of what has come to be called "sound art", although her thought and creative practice consistently challenge key assumptions about the capacities and limitations of the genre. Amacher's work anticipates some of the most important developments in network culture, media arts, acoustic ecology, and sound studies, yet due to its expansive interdisciplinary nature, it has rarely been documented. Following two CDs for Tzadik and her inclusion in the monumental collection OHM: The Early Gurus Of Electronic Music (1948-1980), this publication of Amacher's 1991 piece Petra marks her first commercially available instrumental work. Petra was originally commissioned for the ICSM World Music Days in Boswil, Switzerland. Written for two pianos, the piece is a unique example of Amacher's late work, a direct extension of her working methodologies for electronic composition taken into an acoustic realm that alludes to the music of Giacinto Scelsi and Galina Ustvolskaya. Petra is a sweeping, durational work based on both Amacher's impressions of the church at Boswil and science-fiction writer Greg Bear's short story of the same name, in which gargoyles come to life and breed with humans in a post-apocalyptic Notre Dame. This solemn interpretation of Petra was recorded at its 2017 American premiere at New York's St. Peter's Episcopal Church with pianists Marianne Schroeder, who originally performed the piece alongside Amacher in 1991, and Stefan Tcherepnin, who performed it alongside Schroeder in 2012 at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. Weighing tranquilizing passages of glacially-paced serenity against stretches of dilapidated, jagged dissonance, the recording illuminates a crucial node in the constellation of Amacher's enigmatic oeuvre. Artistic director of the Giacinto Scelsi Festival in Basel, Marianne Schroeder is a Swiss composer and pianist specializing in the interpretation of New Music. She has collaborated with and premiered work by John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Dieter Schnebel, Anthony Braxton, Morton Feldman, Pauline Oliveros and Giacinto Scelsi, with whom she studied. She is currently a professor at Hochschule der Künste Bern. Stefan Tcherepnin is an American electronic music performer, contemporary artist, and composer in fourth generation, continuing the family heritage of his great-grandfather Nicholas, grandfather Alexander, and father Ivan Tcherepnin.
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BLANK 003BK
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The third issue of Blank Forms's journal is released in conjunction with Freedom Is Around The Corner, a retrospective exhibition and performance series devoted to the work of Danish composer and artist Henning Christiansen (1932-2008). Perhaps best known for his collaborations with artists such as Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, and Dick Higgins, Christiansen, working primarily on the remote Danish island of Møn, moved beyond his Fluxus roots to create a vast, ineffable body of work that spanned music, performance, film, and visual art over the course of a fifty-year career. Christiansen's work has, however, remained under the radar; only a few of his recordings were available until recently, and his prolific compositional and visual outputs have rarely been performed or exhibited in the United States. Freedom Is Around The Corner seeks to present Christiansen's life and work in a holistic manner that befits his dynamic practice, collecting a combination of newly discovered, never-before published, and newly translated materials. In this case, many of the materials were found in the Henning Christiansen Archive. The issue begins with a newly translated interview with Christiansen, conducted circa 2006 by writer Thomas Groetz. Two others were conducted by Francesco Conz and Michael Glasmeier in the 1990s; these three interviews offer a well-rounded picture of the late-career Christiansen through his own, good-humored lens. The fourth interview, a more experimental text conducted by Helmer Nørgaard, was originally published in the magazine DMT, in an issue devoted to Christiansen. Here, it's presented as a translated facsimile, featuring texts on Christiansen by his prominent Danish collaborators, the writer Lars Morell and the artists Per Kirkeby and Bjørn Nørgaard. We hear from other Christiansen collaborators through correspondence, including letters from Emily Harvey and Higgins, and through interviews, including newly conducted interviews with his wife and collaborator, Ursula Reuter Christiansen. Bjorn Nørgaard has also spoken with Christiansen's son Thorbjørn Reuter Christiansen; and later musical collaborators Werner Durand and Ute Wassermann. This issue also features younger artists who have grappled with Christiansen's legacy. Represented through interviews (Lucy Railton), original artworks (Graham Lambkin, Áine O'Dwyer, Stíne Janvin), and essays (Mark Harwood, Anton Lukoszevieze), these artists demonstrate the lasting and diverse impact of Christiansen's work on today's musical landscape. Taken together, the texts in this journal provide an in-depth look, at a towering but overlooked figure in the postwar musical as well as artistic avant-garde. Paper, 448 pages, 6 x 8 inches. Edition of 1000.
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BF 004LP
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Before the spectral, romantic electric guitar miniatures for which he is celebrated today, Loren Connors recorded a string of nine solo acoustic guitar improvisations under the name of Loren Mazzacane between 1979 and 1980. The records feature Loren's contorted impressions of Delta and country blues, persistently kneaded into sidelong guitar excursions entangled with wordless, mournful vocal utterances, hummed and moaned in imitation of the dogs that often howled outside his window. Originally released on Loren's own Daggett Records (named after the street he lived on in New Haven), these LPs slipped into obscurity after Daggett's distributor went bankrupt, forcing the guitarist, who didn't have a car, to dispose of their unsold stock rather than drag the records home without transportation. Now, thanks to a recording found by Unseen Worlds's Tommy McCutchon in the archives of Columbia University, Blank Forms presents the tenth volume of the series. Recorded in Woodstock, in front of a live audience at the Creative Music Studio (the improvised music nonprofit founded by Karl Berger, Ornette Coleman, and Ingrid Sertso), Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Improvisations Vol. 10 provides a welcome addition to the canon of Loren's early solo releases and is the first contemporary vinyl publication of material from his Daggett Street period. As with the original Daggett records, the LP is issued in handmade covers with paste-on art featuring a replica of a recent drawing included in Loren's October 2018 art exhibition Wild Weeds, presented by Blank Forms. One of the world's most singular guitarists, Connors is among few living musicians whose prolific body of work can be said to be wholly justified in its plenitude. On more than 100 records across almost four decades on labels like Table of the Elements, Drag City, Ecstatic Yod, and his own Daggett Records, Connors has wrung distinctive shades of ephemeral blues from his guitar, its sound ever-shifting while remaining unmistakably his own. From his early, splintered take on the Delta bottleneck style through his song-based albums with Suzanne Langille and on to the painterly abstraction that defines his current work, Connors has earned the admiration of many, leading to collaborations with the likes of John Fahey, Jim O'Rourke, Keiji Haino, Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, Alan Licht, and Jandek. Creative Music Studio is an ongoing organization that engages musicians and listeners from all backgrounds to deepen and broaden their musical sensitivity, expression, and understanding through workshops, recordings, and concerts worldwide.
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BLANK 003LP
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Hairbone is a New York-based power trio of artists Raúl de Nieves, Jessie Stead, and Nathan Whipple, formerly known as Haribo. Functioning mainly in the art world, Hairbone has inflicted audiences from museums to decrepit basements with their carnivalesque live shows for nearly a decade. Each unique, thematically pointed multimedia performance narrative features frontman de Nieves inhabiting new personae in a sculptural actionist mode, brandishing oversized text-emblazoned props as if they were picket signs before their eventual destruction as Hairbone's near-opera burlesque freak shows unfurl. Obliquely political, theirs is a protest music without didacticism. Despite Hairbone's prolific, obsessively-documented life as a performance art group, Earth To Momma is the band's first studio LP, distilling their sprawling live shows into 12 distinct pieces of lyrical, art-damaged rock and pop music. Their institutional success begs for comparisons to artists' bands like Destroy All Monsters or Die Tödliche Doris, but Hairbone's confusion of high and low culture fits them equally into peerdom with the classic American underground of the Butthole Surfers and Sun City Girls. A native of Mexico, de Nieves' bi-lingual incantations are bolstered by Stead's synthetic drum sampling and acid-fried neoclassical shredder excess courtesy of guitarist Whipple. The record is a shapeshifting suite that fits veiled commodity critique, volcanic convulsions, blasé songcraft, and a breezy instrumental into a hallucinatory vision haunted by abject clowns and the grain of twisted emergency police calls. With tongue set firmly in cheek across Stead's ode to Chateau Diana bodega "wine product" and de Nieves' simulated Kim Gordon sighting, Hairbone maintain an irreverent authenticity in an era when the mere notion has become a barren field. With cover art by Jessie Stead, the record also features guest appearances from Mudboy, Lucy Jean Powers, Sergei Tcherepnin, and Yu Yamaguchi. Edition of 500.
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BLANK 002BK
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Music from the World Tomorrow, the second issue of Blank Forms' journal, brings together a combination of never-before published, lost, and newly translated materials. Featuring Marshall Allen and the Sun Ra Arkestra on the cover, this issue also includes John Corbett's writing on the enigmatic annotations found on Sun Ra's reel-to-reel tape archives. Visionary avant-garde jazz vocalist Patty Waters speaks with Larry J. Nai about the art and experiences that moved her from childhood to the then-now, touching upon her mysterious '70s and '80s period of musical inactivity, in a rare 1997 Halana interview reprinted here. "I struggle," a prose poem by Matana Roberts, explores the creative conundrum of making American music in a state of national crisis under POTUS #45. Maryanne Amacher remains a focal point of this second issue, with three pieces here: scholar Amy Cimini contributes a text detailing the genesis, score, and theoretical underpinnings of Amacher's Adjacencies; Joan Brigham presents Scott Fisher's account of his career working with virtual reality and 3D stereoscopic imaging; and an excerpt from science-fiction writer Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men is reproduced, a favorite of Amacher's. Tony Conrad is represented twice: Filmmaker Andrew Lampert introduces a selection of Conrad's OLD IDEAS in full color -- handwritten notes from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s; and a new transcription of a 1989 phone interview by Alan Licht. Conversely, in her rediscovered 2001 interview with Marcus Boon, Swedish minimalist Catherine Christer Hennix praises La Monte's revival of just intonation. This issue also features a transcription of a 2017 Annea Lockwood talk and conversation with crys cole, discussing Lockwood's Tiger Balm (1970) and Ear-Walking Man/Woman (1996). Bassoonist Dafne Vicente-Sandoval contributes a text that sheds light on the performance of Jakob Ullmann's threshold compositions Muntzers stern (2015) and Solo II (1992), forthcoming on Editions RZ (RZ 1038-39CD). And Klaus Lang provides both an aphorism about cow behavior and a manifesto for compositional strategies. Krautrock group Anima's 1981 US tour diary has been newly translated from German for inclusion here. A chapter from David Hopkins's recent translation of legendary Japanese folk singer Kan Mikami's autobiography is featured. Composer Tashi Wada contributes a print titled Double Vision. And Japanese sound art pioneer Akio Suzuki's self-published 2008 Aki-nyan, tora no maki gets a full reprint. Edited by Lawrence Kumpf and Joe Bucciero. 333 pages; 6x8 inches; Edition of 750.
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BF 001CS
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In memory of the late polymath avant-garde artist Tony Conrad (1940-2016), longtime friend and coconspirator Charlemagne Palestine returned to the site of their first encounter for a tribute performance on what would have been Conrad's 77th birthday. Charlemagne Palestine is a composer, performer and visual artist born in Brooklyn in 1947. Often labeled as one of the founders of minimalism alongside Glass, Niblock, Reich, Riley, and Young, he prefers to call himself a "maximalist", eschewing the clinical stereotypes of the former term in favor of a full-blown erotics of possibility that in its ritualistic performance conjures a sense of sacredness without specificity. But before the intoxicating overtones of the Strumming Music (SR 297CD, SSH 003LP) for which he is best known, before the stuffed animals and snifter of cognac that have become his trademark onstage, Palestine's first solo performances were as carillonneur of the Saint Thomas Church at 53rd Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan. From 5:00 to 5:30, every day between 1963 and 1970, Palestine operated the 26-bell carillon, starting with the hymns he was expected to play before shifting into improvised "klanggdedangggebannggg" sessions that would form the basis for his incantatory repetitions to come. Palestine hammered the instrument's keys with his fists and pounded its pedals with his feet, effectively playing the entire building while relishing the corporeal thrill of the ceremony. Soon known as the Quasimodo of midtown NYC, his performances became a sonic mainstay of the neighborhood, attracting a diverse group of fans including Tony Conrad who, then living in Times Square, one day introduced himself inside the church. The artists became fast friends and collaborators, with Palestine recording some of Conrad's work on the carillon and contributing music to his film Coming Attractions (1970). On March 7th, 2017, Palestine climbed the spiral stairs of the Saint Thomas Church's bell tower once again. This cassette features a full recording of STTT THOMASSS ''''"'"DINGGGDONGGGDINGGGzzzzzzz ferrrr TONYYY'''''''', preceded by a brief incantation delivered one month later at a Tony Conrad memorial.
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BLANK 001BK
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Magazine is the inaugural issue of Blank Forms' journal, bringing together a combination of never-before published, lost, and new materials that supplement the non-profit's live programs. It is envisioned as a platform for critical reflection and extended dialogue between scholars, artists, and other figures working within the world of experimental music and art. Following "Let Freedom Fry" -- a short statement by Joe McPhee drawing out the contemporary political climate in relation to his practice as a creative improviser -- the magazine is bookended by four texts surrounding the practice of pioneering sound artist Maryanne Amacher; an essay by Bill Dietz on his collaborations with Amacher and his work with her archive; an unpublished 1988 interview highlighting Amacher's ideas around her Long Distance Music and Mini Sound Series; a conversation between Marianne Schroeder, Stefan Tcherepnin, and Lawrence Kumpf revealing the archival questions raised by Amacher's work; and science fiction writer Greg Bear's short story Petra, a tale of gargoyles coming to life and breeding with humans in a post-apocalyptic Notre Dame, from which Amacher's 1991 piece got its name. This issue also includes Branden Joseph's interview with The Dead C's Bruce Russell, accompanied by Russell's essay exploring the Situationist tradition of "mis-competence" in New Zealand electronic music. Charles Curtis contributed notes on the interpretive challenges posed by a posthumous performance of Terry Jennings's minimalist classic Piece For Cello And Saxophone. Shelley Hirsch, Richard Skidmore, and Dennis Hermanson provide a series of writings on and remembrances of the late Ralston Farina, whose scarcely documented "visual poetry" was an important precursor to what we now call "performance." And from her own 2016 performances at the Emily Harvey Foundation, Dawn Kasper supplies her original proposal document and score notes for an improvisational interpretation. Magazine features two new French-translations: an excerpt from François Bonnet's book of phenomenology, The Infra-World, translated by Robin Mackay, and a Christophe Broqua interview with enigmatic huntress of sounds Anne Gillis, translated by Adrian Rew. Ian Nagoski's rare 1998 conversation with Éliane Radigue, conducted and largely ignored at a time when there was little interest in her music, provides one of the clearest overviews of the visionary composer's early work and life. Supplementing the texts are numerous archival photos and documents, plus "Dark Matters", a poem by Joe McPhee. Edited by Lawrence Kumpf and Joe Bucciero.
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