★Blank Forms
A Strange Celestial Road (Book, Paperback)
In this memoir, Harlem-born trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah recounts decades of national and international touring with the Sun Ra Arkestra and charts the rise of New York loft jazz scene, offering a fascinating portrait of advanced music in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan from the 1970s through the 1990s.
Blue in Green (Book)
Hardcover, cloth binding, dust jacket The latest work from the veteran novelist called “one hell of a writer” by James Baldwin, “wonderfully wry” by Donald Barthelme, and a “writer’s writer” by Ishmael Reed, Blue in Green narrates one evening in August 1959, when, only eight days after the release of his landmark album Kind of Blue, Miles Davis is assaulted by a member of New York City Police Department outside of Birdland. In the aftermath of Davis’s brief stint in custody, we enter the straine…
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 …
Irida Records: Hybrid Musics from Texas and Beyond, 1979–1986
An incredible set of vinyl reissues explores the unfolding sonic fiction of Texan composer Jerry Hunt and others affiliated with his Irida label.
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…
The Cricket: Black Music in Evolution, 1968–69
A rare document of the 1960s Black Arts Movement featuring Albert Ayler, Amiri Baraka, Milford Graves, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, and many more, The Cricket fostered critical and political dialogue for Black musicians and writers. Edited by poets and writers Amiri Baraka, A.B. Spellman, and Larry Neal between 1968 and 1969 and published by Baraka's New Jersey–based Jihad productions shortly after the time of the Newark Riots, this experimental music magazine ran poetry, position papers, and gossip al…
Kazuki Tomokawa 1975–1977
Tip! A poet, soothsayer, bicycle race tipster, actor, prolific drinker, self-taught guitarist, and living legend of Japanese sound, Kazuki Tomokawa catapulted into Tokyo’s avant-folk scene in the mid-1970s, forging a sound and sensibility marked by throat-wrenching vocals and searing ennui. Among his musical peers in postwar Japan, Tomokawa distinguished himself as a pioneer of radical individualism. He had “the personality of a hydrogen bomb”—as the notorious ultraleft band the Brain Police on…
Finally, His First Album
Tip! At the tender age of twenty-five, while he was working part-time at an Italian restaurant in Tokyo’s Kamata district, Kazuki Tomokawa released his debut record, fittingly titled Finally, His First Album. While he had already penned hundreds of songs, including his first single “Try Saying You’re Alive!,” written on a long train ride past fields and rice paddies, it was this recording that introduced Japan to one of its most unique musicians of the postwar era. Each track, as record label …
Straight from the Throat
Tip! In the 1970s, Kazuki Tomokawa catapulted into Tokyo’s avant-garde scene with his cathartic and utterly electrifying performances. Straight from the Throat, Tomokawa’s second album, released in July 1976 by Harvest Records, finds the musician in his truest form: as the “screaming philosopher” he would come to be called—cynical but fair, cheeky and melancholic, and looking at the world with truth-seeking eyes.
In Straight from the Throat, Tomokawa shrieks and shouts and wallows with ritualis…
A String of Paper Cranes Clenched between My Teeth
Tip! In a generation of musicians that came of age in postwar Japan, Kazuki Tomokawa stands as a pioneer of radical individualism, with a sound marked by shocking intimacy and blistering honesty. In his third album, A String of Paper Cranes Clenched between My Teeth, released by Harvest Records in 1977, Tomokawa creeps “ever more inward,” as Kiichi Takahara writes in the record’s original introductory text—embracing an attitude pervasive amongst musicians of the time who interrogated the prosaic…
Ground: Five Mechanic Convention Streams
The final album released by the composer-performer Jerry Hunt before his death, Ground: Five Mechanic Convention Streams is a rare and foundational audio document of Hunt’s compositional process. The record collects five pieces from the artist’s “Ground” series, translating his characteristically variable and spatial scores into “recorded fixtures of activity using mechanic musical instrument arrays,” to eerie and mesmerizing results. Originally released by experimental label OODiscs in 1992, it…
Blank Forms 08: Transmission from the Pleroma (Book)
Jerry Hunt (1943–1993) has been described as a shamanic figure with the look of a Central Texas meat inspector. One of the most compelling composers in the world of late twentieth-century new music, he made work that combined video synthesis, installation art, and early computers with rough-hewn sculptures, scores drawn from celestial alphabets, and homemade electronics activated by his signature wands and impassioned gestures. Hunt lived his entire life in Texas, eventually settling in a house …
The Summer House Sessions / Organic Music Theatre (3LP in bundle)
This bundle includes the following Don Cherry LPs recently released by Blank Forms:Don Cherry "The Summer House Sessions" (LP)Don Cherry "Organic Music Theatre - Festival de jazz de Chateauvallon 1972" (2LP)
Don Cherry "The Summer House Sessions" (LP)* Black vinyl, pressed at RTI and housed in a heavy-duty tip-on Stoughton jacket, with insert. * In 1968, Don Cherry had already established himself as one of the leading voices of the avant-garde. Having pioneered free jazz as a member of Ornette C…
Salmon Run
Salmon Run (Kye, 2007) is an exercise in listening, a contemplation of the sounds that permeate everyday life. In Salmon Run, available now on LP for the first time, Graham Lambkin's field recordings are profoundly democratic, collecting bits of classical music playing in the background, remnants of domestic routines and childrearing, and bird calls, chimes, and rushing water alike. The resulting fragments, manipulated and assembled by Lambkin, form a strikingly intimate sonic assemblage -- an e…
Amateur Doubles
Taped largely in a Honda Civic, Amateur Doubles (Kye, 2011) is a portrait of an oft-overlooked domestic stage: the car. Graham Lambkin captures the sounds of a family in-motion as they fiddle with windows, play with toys, bicker, pass traffic, and listen, as the song titles note, to French prog artists Besombes/Rizet and Philippe Grancher. While the set-up at first appears simple -- a car ride taken by the artist and his family through upstate New York -- Lambkin subtly and slyly manipulates the…
Poem (For Voice & Tape)
"I made the basic recordings of Tim Goss's voice during a recent return trip to England. Despite some initial reservations Tim ended up giving an animated and robust reading, drawn exclusively from work of his own creation. These tapes were then transported back to Poughkeepsie, NY, where the project was teased to completion." (Original LP sleeve notes)
Softly Softly Copy Copy
A study in anticipation, Softly Softly Copy Copy (Kye, 2009) repurposes the expectant rumblings of an audience-in-waiting, lifted by Graham Lambkin from various concert recordings of the German kosmische band Tangerine Dream. These bootlegged clips provide a skeleton for various sonic scraps and interludes—including distorted and abandoned fragments from Lambkin’s archive, new recordings on guitar and violin by Austin Argentieri and Samara Lubelski, respectively—that, together, form a compositio…
Blank Forms, Vol. 7: The Cowboy’s Dreams of Home
Edited by Lawrence Kumpf and Joe Bucciero with contributions from Angel Bat Dawid, Joe Bucciero, Charles Curtis, René Daumal, Thulani Davis, Anthony Elms, Ciarán Finlayson, Jessica Hagedorn, Judith Hamann, Sarah Hennies, Louise Landes Levi, Alan Licht, and Tashi Wada. The Cowboy’s Dreams of Home, the seventh Blank Forms anthology, takes its name from a psychedelic Wild West reverie of Texan singer-songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen. This volume privileges new texts including a retrospectiv…
Partners: A Biography of Jerry Hunt
Jerry Hunt (1943–93) was among the most eccentric figures in the world of new music. A frenetic orator, occultist and engineering consultant, his works from the 1970s through the early ’90s made use of readymade sculptures, medical technology, arcane talismans and all manner of homemade electronic implements to form confrontational recordings and enigmatic, powerful performances. Tracing Hunt’s life across his home state’s major cities to a self-built house in rural Van Zandt County, this memoir…