Over the last few years, we've found ourselves with no shortage of praise for the New York based curatorial platform, publisher, and record label Blank Forms. Almost entirely unique in the landscape of experimental art and sound, they've brought forth a vast range of materials at a startling pace — archival and contemporary texts and music — as well as presenting concerts, exhibitions, and talks. Central to the initiative's output is their label, which, since launching in 2017, has delivered groundbreaking releases by Charlemagne Palestine, Don Cherry, Maryanne Amacher, Judith Hamann, Atrás Del Cosmos, The Shadow Ring, James Rushford, Jerry Hunt, Takehisa Kosugi, Akio Suzuki, and numerous others, collectively building bridges between various idioms of experimental practice, across their historical and contemporary realizations. Following an incredibly prolific 2024, the label's been relatively quiet so far this year, but as is so often the case, good things come for those who wait. Just in time for summer, Blank Forms drops two astounding new full-lengths from Ellen Arkbro.



Ellen Arkbro “Nightclouds” (LP)

Born in 1990, Ellen Arkbro belongs to a generation of ambitious young composers who began to emerge from Stockholm during the 2010s. Initially trained as a singer with a focus on jazz, before shifting focus to study at the Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) and the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, where she received her degree in Electroacoustic Music Composition, she expanded her already rich sonic vocabulary through studies with La Monte Young and Marc Sabat, as well as through her work within Catherine Christer Hennix's Kamigaku Ensemble. Working with both acoustic instrumentation and synthesis, her work is largely rooted in investigations of intervallic harmony in just intonation — pursuing listening as an active process of creative participation — manifesting as remarkably rich minimalist pieces which have been met by wide acclaim in live performance and via the LPs, “For Organ and Brass” (2017), “Chords” (2019), and “Sounds While Waiting” (2023).

There's something difficult to pin down in Arkbro's work; a focus, consideration, and ambition that sets her apart from her peers. Her compositions, for all of their elegance and grace, feel hard thought and like every choice has resulted precisely in the desired effect. This is no less the case for “Nightclouds”, her fourth full-length, which collects five improvisations for solo organ, recorded across Central Europe between 2023 and 2024. While rooted in a more open approach toward composition than some of her previous efforts, the album remains defined by the rigor and precision that has always defined Arkbro's work, drawing upon influences taken from sacred music, ECM-style jazz, and downtown minimalism, enveloping the ear in slowly emerging structures built from complex harmonic intersections.

Drawing upon specificities of a variety of spaces and the unique characters of different organs, “Nightclouds” begins with the piece from which the album draws its name, encountering Arkbro performing simultaneously on the Sauer organ and Utopa Baroque organ at Orgelpark in Amsterdam. Constructed from a slowed down and stretched, continuously modulated harmonic progression, the composer draws profound depth from the piece's elegant, simple chordal scaffolds that support rich, ever-shifting textures. The second side is entirely dedicated to the long-form work “Morningclouds”, recorded in the reconstructed Gedächtniskirche (Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church) in Berlin, interweaving two returning themes and forming immersive shifts through chord changes that rock like a ship in gentle seas.

Among her most engrossing bodies of work since her wildly celebrated debut, “For Organ and Brass” (2017), with “Nightclouds” — her first release with Blank Forms, co-issued with La Becque Editions — Ellen Arkbro furthers her status as one of the most important composers working in experimental music today. Issued as a beautifully produced vinyl LP, gloriously mastered by Stephan Mathieu, this one is an instant classic in contemporary minimalism and drone that's not to be missed.



Hanne Lippard, Ellen Arkbro, and Hampus Lindwall “How do I know if my cat likes me?” (LP)

Moving into slightly more uncharted waters, the second in Blank Forms' latest batch of LPs encounters Ellen Arkbro in a trio configuration with Hanne Lippard and Hampus Lindwall, intertwining Lippard's deeply poetic expressions of text, Lindwall's strong abstract sensibility, with her minimal expressions. Lippard is an English, Berlin-based artist who has been working across the fields of text, vocal performance, sound installation, printed objects and sculpture, for more than a decade, with a practice that rests at the juncture of the spoken and written word, investigating how the rise in digital communication and mediation reprograms our relationship to language. Lindwall, on the other hand, belongs to a generation of artists who emerged in Stockholm prior to Arkbro, and among the most noteworthy organists currently working in the contemporary landscape of experimental sound.

Initially conceived by Lippard and Arkbro when both were in residence at La Becque in La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, “How do I know if my cat likes me?” is an existential meditation on the empty expanses of our automated everyday, self-described as “corporatized minimalism tinged with cool formalism, structured by the deft deployment of sonic and lyrical repetition, attempting to untether sound from explicit meaning through cycles of repetition as a means to satirize the aesthetics of alienated life”. Recorded in part on the organs at Temple Saint-Théodule, across the album's two sides Arkbro and Lindwall's intertwining organ lines unfurl as total landscapes around Lippard's vocal recitations of customer-service loops that shift from pure linguistic function to pure linguistic aesthetics.

Drifting from “online banking” to “breathing down your neck banking” and “sexy, but bankrupt, banking”, the trio sketches a world of sadistic, deadpan banality, and the strange pleasure and meaning that can grow from within. Comprising seven pieces in total, including a noteworthy interpretation of Phil Harmonic's classic 1978 composition “Timing” — originally written for and performed by "Blue" Gene Tyranny — and Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers' disco anthem, “At Last I Am Free” — famously reinterpreted by Robert Wyatt — as “How do I know if my cat likes me?” rolls and ebbs, the trio threads a fascinating, strikingly contemporary path through the realms of musical minimalism, sound poetry, and conceptual art, throughout which existential angst dissolves into hypnagogic detachment.

Beautiful, challenging, and guided by a wry, cutting humor that serves as a brilliant counterpoint to the seriousness of its subjects and the creative rigor that guided it into being, “How do I know if my cat likes me?” leads the pack in a growing groundswell of contemporary sound poetics. Let's hope it's only the first of many outings to come from the trio. Issued by Blank Forms and La Becque Editions as a lovingly produced vinyl LP, mastered to the highest standard by Stephan Mathieu, this one is absolutely essential for any fan of these three artists, sound art, sound poetry, and experimental music at large.