★Blank Forms
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".
Axis/Another Revolvable Thing 2
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.
Axis/Another Revolvable Thing 1
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.
Blank Forms - Vol. 5: Aspirations of Madness
Edited by Lawrence Kumpf with Joe Bucciero. Contributors and featured artists include Masayuki Takayanagi, Louise Landes Levi, Joseph Jarman, Catherine Christer Hennix, Charles Stein, Henry Orlov, Maryanne Amacher, Alan Cummings, Bill Dietz, Peter Kastakis, Art Lange, Leo Svirsky, Satoru Obara, and Tomoyuki Chida.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 Ma…
Poesy Matters and Other Matters (2xBooks)
This two-volume set, Poësy Matters and Other Matters, presents selected texts by the Swedish polymath Catherine Christer Hennix. Volume one, Poësy Matters, is divided into two sections: poetry and drama, with each section also containing pieces of commentary by Hennix or her longtime collaborator Henry Flynt. Volume two, Other Matters, is divided into two sections: first, program notes and essays about a wide range of topics (including music, psychoanalysis, and mathematics), and second, a repro…
Black Case Volume I and II: Return From Exile
Last copies...Joseph Jarman (1937 - 2019) was a saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist best known as a founding member of trailblazing avant-garde jazz group Art Ensemble of Chicago. Jarman was responsible for the Art Ensemble’s signature face paint and elaborate costumes as well as the pioneering theatrical and multimedia elements of their shamanistic performances, which could include dance, comedy, performance art, surreal pranks, and—notably—the recitation of Jarman’s poetry. In 1977, Art Ense…
Autumn\'s Sun
One of the world’s most singular guitarists, Loren 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, Connors has wrung distinct 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 abstrac…
Live
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 juxtaposes a side of hushed self-com…
Selections from 100 Models of Hegikan Roku
** Astonishing 1976 recordings of drone works inspired by La Monte Young and the Theatre of Eternal Music ** A co-edition with Empty Editions. Selections from 100 Models of Hegikan Roku is the second in an ongoing series of archival records of the unheard music of Swedish composer, philosopher, poet, mathematician, and visual artist Catherine Christer Hennix, co-released by Blank Forms Editions and Empty Editions. It follows last year’s Selected Early Keyboard Works and anticipates Blank Forms’ …
Blank Forms - Vol. 4: Intelligent Life
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: …
April Is The Cruellest Month
CD Edition. **Legendary "lost" album originally due to be released on the ESP-Disk, but the label folded before its release. Limited Edition** 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…
Petra
CD Edition. 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 limita…
Earth To Momma
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 …
Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Improvisations Vol. 10 (Art Editio
**Art edition of 100 copies, hand-painted and -drawn by Loren Connors** 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 …
Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Improvisations Vol. 10
**Edition of 400 copies, sold-out at source** 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…