BLANK FORMS - Forced Exposure

$90.00 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 3/12/2021

The years between Graham Lambkin's tenure with the legendary Shadow Ring and his more recent improvisational duos mark a distinct period of creative production within the artist's insular career. Living with his family in Poughkeepsie, NY, from 2001 through 2011 Lambkin recorded and self-released four solo albums that valorized mundane domestic situations while reveling in the liminal spaces between the acts of listening, recording, and producing. Created through an ingenious economy of means, these solo records are as beguilingly seductive as they are uncanny. Perpetually laughing in his own duplicitous face, Lambkin breathed new life into musique concrète and sound poetry, giving outmoded forms a contemporary consciousness while setting the gold standard for a continuously unfolding canon of 21st century tape music. Poem (For Voice & Tape) (2001), Salmon Run (2007), Softly Softly Copy Copy (2009), and Amateur Doubles (2011) are now remastered and finally back in print, with Salmon Run and Softly Softly Copy Copy available on vinyl for the first time. This deluxe boxed set of Graham Lambkin's first four solo records includes an expansive 42-page book featuring unseen photos and reproductions of artworks as well as essays and anecdotal recollections providing fresh insight and divulging hermetic secrets by Ed Atkins, Mark Harwood, Matt Krefting, Lawrence Kumpf, Samara Lubelski, and Adrian Rew.

Graham Lambkin (b. 1973, Dover, England) is a multidisciplinary artist who first came to prominence in the early '90s through the formation of his experimental music group The Shadow Ring. As a sound organizer rather than music maker, Lambkin looks at an everyday object and sees an ocean of possibility, continually transforming quotidian atmospheres and the mundane into expressive sound art using tape manipulation techniques, chance operations, and the thick ambience of domestic field recordings. His Kye imprint, founded in 2001, was an instrumental platform for the dissemination of and dialogue between work by an intergenerational cast of artists using sound, including Henning Christiansen, Anton Heyboer, Moniek Darge, and Gabi Losoncy. He began showing his visual art in 2014 with Came To Call Mine, an exhibition curated by Lawrence Kumpf and Justin Luke at Audio Visual Arts in conjunction with the publication of Lambkin's children's book (for adults) of the same name, and has since exhibited his work at 356 Mission, Künstlerhaus, PiK, and Blank Forms.

$18.50 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 1/15/2021

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 the pulse of her cello, inciting it to shake audibly and visually as a symbiotic basis for determining the rate of her own left hand's tremor and consequent direction of resonant frequencies. Following a thorough harmonic investigation of her shaking practice in two parts, she directs us to look outwards, combining beating chordal structures with electronics and recordings of real world shaking. From inner pulse to more macrocosmic quaking, Hamann's alternative conception of shaking rejects measurement and regularity, order and control, instead alluding to a more responsive and intuitive mode of convulsive sounding. It's presented alongside the CD set, Music for Cello and Humming (BF 018CD). Judith Hamann undertook her doctoral studies with renowned cellist Charles Curtis, with whom she is currently engaged in a discourse-based project, "Materialities of Realisation." She has additionally demonstrated a superlative capacity for improvisation and engagement with sonic arts through work with artists Dennis Cooper, Éliane Radigue, Áine O'Dwyer, Ilan Volkov, Toshimaru Nakamura, La Monte Young, and Marian Zazeela, Golden Fur, Jessika Kenney, Anna Homler, Yvette Janine Jackson, and Lori Goldston, among others. Her recorded appearances include Tashi Wada's Duets, Graham Lambkin's Community, Alvin Lucier's Illuminated By The Moon, and Gossamers, with Rosalind Hall. Edition of 500.

$15.00 IN STOCK

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 the femme presenting body in performance, humming here also references dislocation, or ventriloquism. Although teetering on the edge of audibility, the intimate and vulnerable closed-mouth sounding enters into subtle interference with her cello, drifting into acoustical beating and bringing instability to otherwise more formal grid structures. The capacity for rupture of this volatile fragility reaches its apotheosis on Hennies' "Loss," a piece that deliberately instructs Hamann to hum beyond the limits of her voice range. Going against the grain of chamber music orthodoxy, the guaranteed failure set in motion by this instruction yields a generative sound of effort reminiscent of Xenakis's storied desire for an instrumentalist to play with the sorrow of knowing they can't do everything. With an arc suggestive of sudden life change, "Loss" casts queer epistemology onto composition, positioning failure, undoing, unbecoming, and transforming as alternative ways of knowing or being. Hennies's signature composite merging of individual components here brings oral sounds that include breathing and coughing together with humming, cello, and sine waves. Like Glenn Gould's 1982 Goldberg Variations or Pauline Oliveros's Accordion and Voice, this timbral meeting of bodily utterances with consummate musicianship imbues Hamann's humming work with a breakable, human strand, here as humbling as it is uncomfortable. Music for Cello and Humming is accompanied by an essay on both recordings by Nora Fulton. It's presented alongside the LP set, Shaking Studies (BF 017LP). Judith Hamann undertook her doctoral studies with renowned cellist Charles Curtis, with whom she is currently engaged in a discourse-based project, "Materialities of Realisation." She has additionally demonstrated a superlative capacity for improvisation and engagement with sonic arts through work with artists Dennis Cooper, Éliane Radigue, Áine O'Dwyer, Ilan Volkov, Toshimaru Nakamura, La Monte Young, and Marian Zazeela, Golden Fur, Jessika Kenney, Anna Homler, Yvette Janine Jackson, and Lori Goldston, among others. Her recorded appearances include Tashi Wada's Duets, Graham Lambkin's Community, Alvin Lucier's Illuminated By The Moon, and Gossamers, with Rosalind Hall. Edition of 500.

$18.50 IN STOCK

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 with an emo band in Chicago and the intimate aggregation of the trio's sound heterodoxy -- an astonishing cohabitation of fractured R&B, wistful sensitivity, and harmolodic guitar -- begins to show its strands. With punk autonomy, Still House Plants navigate a similarly divergent approach to ostensibly kindred artists Linda & Sonny Sharrock or James "Blood" Ulmer, but instead cite the cut-up effect of UK garage as the impetus for their sparse treatment of chords and words as samples; stuttered, fragmented, and permuted by living drums, guitar, and Hickie-Kallenach's unmistakable husky voice. Written aided by mobile phones, dictaphones, laptop recordings of rehearsals, conversations, and live shows, Fast Edit is a collage of different fidelities and aural spaces, a palimpsest most tenderly exhibited on album centerpiece "Shy Song". Things sit on top of each other, fall over one another, or click into place, with hearts on sleeves and spirits in motion.

$18.50 IN STOCK

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's instruments as well as their synergetic integration of music with artistic practice. Preferring the stark contrast of analog/digital, acoustic/electric, and natural/unnatural sounds, Karlsson contributes synthesizers in addition to piano, celesta, and bells, while Iwasa collides anachronistic '90s Yamaha keyboard and guitaret with contrabass recorder, drums, kalimba, and three of Don Cherry's instruments: one of his trumpets as well as two of his "zen saxophones", handmade woodwinds appending reed mouthpieces to plastic plumbing parts, also called Don's kettles after their high-pitched sound. With such timbral juxtapositions, the spirit of Exotic Sin is reminiscent of a number of leftfield jazz-meets-electronics '70s duos from Don Cherry's maverick collaborations with Jon Appleton and Terry Riley to Anthony Braxton's work with Richard Teitelbaum, İlhan Mimaroğlu and Freddie Hubbard's Sing Me a Song of Songmy (1971), and Muhal Richard Abrams's electronic works. On album opener "Dot 2 Dot", Karlsson's measured, monastic piano sets an elegiac stage for kettle bends and absurdist electro-percussive filtering courtesy of Iwasa before a flourish of cascading ebonies and ivories together with restorative circular trumpet motifs bring the sidelong piece to a majestic resolution. Named after the character from Ridley Scott's 1989 film Black Rain, the schizosphere of "Charlie Vincent" interfaces ominous, dystopian synthesizer with permuted organ swells before album closer "Canis Minor" sets gentle sail for a distant bed of lonesome stars. A visual artist as well as an archivist and coordinator for the Cherry estate, Karlsson continues to learn and study Don's compositions and approach to piano with her uncles Eagle-Eye and David, who were taught by Don himself, and his use of short piano compositions as loose scaffoldings for improvisation is prevalent across the record's three otherworldly unfurlings. Improvisor and multidisciplinary artist Kenichi Iwasa is also known for his legendary Krautrock Karaoke night, his contribution to Beatrice Dillon's 2020 album Workaround, and collaborations with visual artists and musicians from Linder Sterling to members of Can, Neu!, Faust, Cluster, and Wire. Recorded and mixed, with additional alto flute, woodwinds, and contrabass recorder by Robbie Lee.

$27.50 IN STOCK

LP version. Axis/Another Revolvable Thing 1 is released alongside Axis/Another Revolvable Thing 2 (BF 016LP). 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 (BF 008CD/LP), a 1975 studio record by his New Direction Unit. Comprised of recordings of a September 5, 1975 concert by the New Direction Unit at Yasuda Seimei Hall in Tokyo's Shinjuku district, the two-part set showcases Takayanagi in deep pursuit of what he began calling "non-section music" after leaping beyond the confines of his prior descriptor "real jazz". The quartet of Takayanagi (guitar), Kenji Mori (reeds), Nobuyoshi Ino (bass, cello), and Hiroshi Yamazaki (percussion) deftly explores the twin poles of Takayanagi's spacious "gradually projection" and explosively virulent "mass projection" concepts across six pieces, titled "Fragments I-VI". Includes original liner notes by Japanese free jazz critic Teruto Soejima (newly translated for this edition). Originally issued in two individual LP volumes in rearranged order; the two separate LP reissues, Axis/Another Revolvable Thing 1 (BF 015LP) and Axis/Another Revolvable Thing 2 (BF 016LP), keep this rearranged order.

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. 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.

$27.50 IN STOCK

LP version. Axis/Another Revolvable Thing 2 is released alongside Axis/Another Revolvable Thing 1 (BF 015LP). 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 (BF 008CD/LP), a 1975 studio record by his New Direction Unit. Comprised of recordings of a September 5, 1975 concert by the New Direction Unit at Yasuda Seimei Hall in Tokyo's Shinjuku district, the two-part set showcases Takayanagi in deep pursuit of what he began calling "non-section music" after leaping beyond the confines of his prior descriptor "real jazz". The quartet of Takayanagi (guitar), Kenji Mori (reeds), Nobuyoshi Ino (bass, cello), and Hiroshi Yamazaki (percussion) deftly explores the twin poles of Takayanagi's spacious "gradually projection" and explosively virulent "mass projection" concepts across six pieces, titled "Fragments I-VI". Includes original liner notes by Japanese free jazz critic Teruto Soejima (newly translated for this edition). Originally issued in two individual LP volumes in rearranged order; the two separate LP reissues, Axis/Another Revolvable Thing 1 (BF 015LP) and Axis/Another Revolvable Thing 2 (BF 016LP), keep this rearranged order.

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. 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.

$19.50 IN STOCK

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 (BF 008CD/LP), a 1975 studio record by his New Direction Unit. Comprised of recordings of a September 5, 1975 concert by the New Direction Unit at Yasuda Seimei Hall in Tokyo's Shinjuku district, the two-part set showcases Takayanagi in deep pursuit of what he began calling "non-section music" after leaping beyond the confines of his prior descriptor "real jazz". The quartet of Takayanagi (guitar), Kenji Mori (reeds), Nobuyoshi Ino (bass, cello), and Hiroshi Yamazaki (percussion) deftly explores the twin poles of Takayanagi's spacious "gradually projection" and explosively virulent "mass projection" concepts across six pieces, titled "Fragments I-VI". Includes original liner notes by Japanese free jazz critic Teruto Soejima (newly translated for this edition). Originally issued in two individual LP volumes in rearranged order; the two separate LP reissues, Axis/Another Revolvable Thing 1 (BF 015LP) and Axis/Another Revolvable Thing 2 (BF 016LP), keep this rearranged order. Double-CD version presents the Another Revolvable Thing concert in chronological sequence for the first time.

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. 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.

$19.50 IN STOCK

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 Masayuki Takayangi that were published in Japanese in 1975-76 and are published here in English for the first time. The interviews provide a rare look at Takayanagi's eccentric practice and personality, both long under-recognized by audiences outside (and often, inside) of Japan. The postwar Japanese history that Takayanagi describes also surfaces in this publication's opening piece, a poetic tribute by the writer and artist Louise Landes Levi to one of Takayanagi's contemporaries, the poet Kazuko Shiraishi. Aspirations of Madness includes a second Levi poem as well, "A Deep River", written while at La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela's Dream House in 2003, while Charles Curtis was rehearsing "Just Charles and Cello in the Romantic Chord", a composition by Young that Blank Forms plans to present in Spring 2020. Complementing this tradition of Japanese free improvisation and poetry is the republication of a 1977 interview with Joseph Jarman, the great composer, poet, and multi-instrumentalist. The interview took place a few months after the publication of Jarman's book Black Case Volume I & II: Return from Exile, a collection of writings from 1960 to 1977 (Blank Forms, Fall 2019). The volume also feature Charles Stein's introduction to Being = Space x Action. In its specificity and rarity of focus, Stein's text offers valuable information on a vibrant artistic network of the recent past, as well as an extended look at the evolution of Catherine Christer Hennix's complex practice. Further along, Aspirations of Madness features an excerpt from The Tree of Music, a cross-cultural treatise by the Russian musicologist Genrich "Henry" Orlov, the English translation of which has never been published before. The Tree of Music is a sweeping philosophical study of global music and cultures with universalist and spiritualist ambitions, excerpts of which are here selected and introduced by the composer and pianist Leo Svirsky. Aspirations of Madness closes with one of Maryanne Amacher's final pieces of writing, The Agreement, from 2009. The text takes the form of a letter between Amacher and the Open Ended Group, with whom she had planned to collaborate on her final, unfinished project, Lagrange: A Four Part Mini Series. Aspirations of Madness features additional contributions by Alan Cummings, Bill Dietz, Peter Kastakis, Art Lange, Leo Svirsky, Satoru Obara, and Tomoyuki Chida, and is edited by Lawrence Kumpf with Joe Bucciero. 242 pages; 6x8 inches.

$20.00 IN STOCK

LP version. 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 unmoored onto a fathomless periphery. Shimada, a Tokyo-born musician and artist who has lived with Herbert Huncke and worked with Henry Flynt, also contributes Indian double-reed instrument shehnai to the band. And Stefan Tcherepnin, a contemporary artist and composer in fourth generation (continuing the family heritage of his great-grandfather Nicholas, grandfather Alexander, and father Ivan Tcherepnin), embellishes their dirge-scapes with electronics from the Sonica, a lute shaped version of the Serge synthesizer developed by his uncle. A family friend and student of Maryanne Amacher, Tcherepnin's piano playing alongside Marianne Schroeder's additionally graced Blank Forms Edition's publication of Amacher's Petra (BF 005CD/LP). Tcherepnin and Shimada are joined by drummer David Silver for Songs From The Shore, their debut LP, featuring artwork in the form of "A Rip In The Void", a newly commissioned painting by Bobby Beausoleil.

$11.50 IN STOCK

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 unmoored onto a fathomless periphery. Shimada, a Tokyo-born musician and artist who has lived with Herbert Huncke and worked with Henry Flynt, also contributes Indian double-reed instrument shehnai to the band. And Stefan Tcherepnin, a contemporary artist and composer in fourth generation (continuing the family heritage of his great-grandfather Nicholas, grandfather Alexander, and father Ivan Tcherepnin), embellishes their dirge-scapes with electronics from the Sonica, a lute shaped version of the Serge synthesizer developed by his uncle. A family friend and student of Maryanne Amacher, Tcherepnin's piano playing alongside Marianne Schroeder's additionally graced Blank Forms Edition's publication of Amacher's Petra (BF 005CD/LP). Tcherepnin and Shimada are joined by drummer David Silver for Songs From The Shore, their debut LP, featuring artwork in the form of "A Rip In The Void", a newly commissioned painting by Bobby Beausoleil.

$27.50 IN STOCK

LP version. Patty Waters is a visionary avant-garde vocalist and composer, best known for her groundbreaking 1960s recordings for the legendary free jazz label ESP-Disk. Captivated by the music of Billie Holiday, she sang with Bill Evans, Charlie Mingus, Chick Corea, and Herbie Hancock before coming to the attention of Albert Ayler, who introduced her to ESP-Disk's Bernard Stollman. The rest is history. Recorded with pianist Burton Greene, Waters' haunting 1966 debut Sings (ESPDISK 1025CD) juxtaposes a side of hushed self-composed jazz ballad miniatures with an iconoclastic take on the standard "Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair". Sharing Ayler's affinity for the deconstruction of folk idioms, Waters dismantles the tune through a series of anguished wails, moans, whispers, and screams that cemented her reputation as a vocal innovator, predating the extended techniques of Yoko Ono, Joan La Barbara, and Linda Sharrock, and cited as a direct influence to Diamanda Galas and Patti Smith's own freeform vocal excursions. The mythic side-long exposition stands as one of the 20th century's most harrowing expressions of madness and grief, its incantatory mutilation of the word "black" into a full-spectrum monochrome resounding with a particular potency at a time when battles for civil rights were erupting across the country. After recording a second ESP-Disk album in 1996 (ESPDISK 1055CD/LP), Waters disappeared from the music scene, moving from New York to California to raise her son. Her Blank Forms concert on April 5th, 2018 -- with original pianist Burton Greene as well as bassist Mario Pavone and percussionist Barry Altschul, both veterans of Paul Bley's ensembles -- was Waters' first New York appearance since 2003. Dedicated to Cecil Taylor, who had passed away moments before she took the stage, Live preserves the mournful tension that was in the air that night. Her first new release on vinyl since 1966's College Tour, the record divides the session in the spirit of her debut. Side A features a set of desolate ballads, including Waters' own classic "Moon, Don't Come Up Tonight", while the B-side puts into stark relief the fact that the fight for civil rights that Waters invoked over 50 years ago is far from over. Beginning with her rendition of "Strange Fruit", a 1937 song written in protest of black lynching and American racism, the suite's form-bending contortions also features the second-ever recording of Waters' original, exceptional lyrical take on Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman."

$15.00 IN STOCK

Patty Waters is a visionary avant-garde vocalist and composer, best known for her groundbreaking 1960s recordings for the legendary free jazz label ESP-Disk. Captivated by the music of Billie Holiday, she sang with Bill Evans, Charlie Mingus, Chick Corea, and Herbie Hancock before coming to the attention of Albert Ayler, who introduced her to ESP-Disk's Bernard Stollman. The rest is history. Recorded with pianist Burton Greene, Waters' haunting 1966 debut Sings (ESPDISK 1025CD) juxtaposes a side of hushed self-composed jazz ballad miniatures with an iconoclastic take on the standard "Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair". Sharing Ayler's affinity for the deconstruction of folk idioms, Waters dismantles the tune through a series of anguished wails, moans, whispers, and screams that cemented her reputation as a vocal innovator, predating the extended techniques of Yoko Ono, Joan La Barbara, and Linda Sharrock, and cited as a direct influence to Diamanda Galas and Patti Smith's own freeform vocal excursions. The mythic side-long exposition stands as one of the 20th century's most harrowing expressions of madness and grief, its incantatory mutilation of the word "black" into a full-spectrum monochrome resounding with a particular potency at a time when battles for civil rights were erupting across the country. After recording a second ESP-Disk album in 1996 (ESPDISK 1055CD/LP), Waters disappeared from the music scene, moving from New York to California to raise her son. Her Blank Forms concert on April 5th, 2018 -- with original pianist Burton Greene as well as bassist Mario Pavone and percussionist Barry Altschul, both veterans of Paul Bley's ensembles -- was Waters' first New York appearance since 2003. Dedicated to Cecil Taylor, who had passed away moments before she took the stage, Live preserves the mournful tension that was in the air that night. Her first new release on vinyl since 1966's College Tour, the record divides the session in the spirit of her debut. Side A features a set of desolate ballads, including Waters' own classic "Moon, Don't Come Up Tonight", while the B-side puts into stark relief the fact that the fight for civil rights that Waters invoked over 50 years ago is far from over. Beginning with her rendition of "Strange Fruit", a 1937 song written in protest of black lynching and American racism, the suite's form-bending contortions also features the second-ever recording of Waters' original, exceptional lyrical take on Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman."

$19.50 IN STOCK

Taking its name from Maryanne Amacher's visionary, unrealized opera, the fourth issue of Blank Forms' journal, Intelligent Life, features a select group of unpublished, newly translated, or otherwise rare texts. The issue opens with a short literary essay by the author Marcia Douglas, in which a deep bass riddim guides a deaf narrator and a reincarnated Bob Marley through important sites in Rastafarianism's development. Next come two interviews with crucial figures in postwar avant-garde music: the Japanese guitarist Kazuo Imai and the American composer Robert Ashley, along with pianist and frequent collaborator "Blue" Gene Tyranny. The previously unpublished interview with Imai was conducted by Blank Forms' editor and artistic director Lawrence Kumpf during Imai's first trip to the United States, in 2018, and finds the artist reflecting on recent work with the collective Marginal Consort as well as his foundational experiences playing with two other titans of Japanese experimentalism, Takehisa Kosugi and Masayuki Takayanagi. The interview with Ashley and "Blue" Gene, meanwhile, first published in German in 1984 on the occasion of a staging of Ashley's opera Atalanta, was translated for the first time into in English for this publication. Intelligent Life continues with a series of longer pieces showcasing a diverse set of complex practices and histories, beginning with that of Detroit-based artist Onyx Ashanti. Onyx contributes his own Octavia Butler-referencing "sonocybernetic manifesto", first published online in 2016, which exists simultaneously as theoretical treatise, memoir, and practical guide to his idiosyncratic technology-based practice. Following this is a comprehensive essay on Catherine Christer Hennix's engagement with intuitionism and other esoteric approaches to math, written by the mathematician and musician Spencer Gerhardt. Gerhardt's lucid, previously unpublished essay serves as a necessary complement to Blank Forms Editions' forthcoming collection of Hennix's abstruse, mostly unpublished body of writing, Poësy Matters and Other Matters. The issue continues with a sort of titular essay, a rich analysis of Amacher's "Intelligent Life" -- the first such piece on this work -- by Amacher scholar Amy Cimini. Intelligent Life was an incredibly prescient work that sought to upend any remaining vestiges of traditional operatic form and staging. Intelligent Life -- the journal issue -- then concludes with a lengthy interview with the artist Walter De Maria. One of the few interviews De Maria gave in his lifetime, this one, created for the Archives of American Art in 1972, sheds significant light on De Maria's early intellectual and artistic development as well as his work as a musician. Although he largely stopped playing music by 1970, and although few recordings of his efforts exist, De Maria played alongside musicians ranging from Lou Reed to Don Cherry to Henry Flynt. Edited by Lawrence Kumpf. Other contributors and featured artists include: Werner Durand, Peter Gente, Heidi Paris, Adrian Rew, Paul Cummings. 302 pages; 6x8 inches; paperback.

$15.00 IN STOCK

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.

$27.50 IN STOCK

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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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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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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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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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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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.