Blank Forms

Blank Forms is a nonprofit organization supporting emerging and historically significant artists who produce work across disciplines, often rooted in traditions of experimental and creative music. Blank Forms aims to establish new frameworks to preserve, nurture, and present these artists' work and to build platforms for practices underrepresented in art's commercial, institutional, and historical fields. Blank Forms collaborates with artists on commissions, exhibitions, publications as well as archival and estate projects within contemporary cultural ecosystems and in perpetuity. In presenting and documenting this work, Blank Forms seeks to foster an artistic community founded upon engaged and equitable conversations across continents, media, and generations
Blank Forms has among its board of directors and curatorial advisory board: David Grubbs, Robbie Lee, Moriah Evans, Nadia Berenstein, Arani Bose, Joe Grimm, Hannah Hoffman, Lawrence Kumpf, Alexander Lau, Josiah McElheny, Louise Neri, Marina Rosenfeld, Kim Schnaubert, Jacques Louis Vidal, Andros Zins-Browne, Charles Curtis, Neneh Cherry, Thulani Davis, Kim Gordon, Shelley Hirsch, Sanya Kantarovsky, Arto Lindsay, Branden W. Joseph, Tommy McCutchon, Ikue Mori, Joe McPhee, Aki Onda, Tony Oursler, Benjamin Piekut et Mónica de la Torre.
 
New York
 
49 titles
Series:
 
Louis Reyes Rivera - A Strange Celestial Road - My Time in the Sun Ra Arkestra
2023
English edition
forthcoming
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.
 Lary 7 - Larynx (vinyl LP)
2023
forthcoming
Recorded in Lary 7's legendary apartment studio Plastikville over nearly a decade, Larynx is the first full-length retrospective of the East Village icon's hybrid music and engineering practice.
Dean Roberts - May 99 (vinyl LP)
2023
forthcoming
The experiments of three musicians with different backgrounds who improvise together around continuous sinusoidal waves, between minimal and rock sensibilities.
Jerry Hunt - Irida Records - Hybrid Musics from Texas and Beyond, 1979–1986  (7LP Box + Book)
2022
The astounding reedition of seven albums exploring the electro-acoustic experiments of Texan composer-performer Jerry Hunt and others affiliated with his Irida label.
Akio Suzuki - New Sense of Hearing (vinyl LP)
2022
Available 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.
Akio Suzuki - New Sense of Hearing (CD)
2022
Available 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.
Wesley Brown - Blue in Green
2022
English edition
Wesley Brown narrates the day when trumpeter Miles Davis was assaulted by the New York Police Department. A dramatic and humorous story, told from multiple perspectives including that of Frances Taylor, Davis's wife, and the musicians in Davis's bands: a timely meditation on the psychological impact of police brutality, through the lens of a day in the life of Miles Davis.
The Cricket - Black Music in Evolution, 1968-69
2022
English edition
Complete facsimile of The Cricket, an important but underknown music magazine edited by poets and writers Amiri Baraka, A. B. Spellman, and Larry Neal in 1968–69—a rare document of the Black Arts Movement.
Jerry Hunt - Blank Forms - Transmissions from the Pleroma
2022
English edition
The height entry in Blank Forms' ongoing series of anthologies is devoted to the Amercian experimental musician/composer/intermedia artist Jerry Hunt.
Jerry Hunt - Ground - Five Mechanic Convention Streams (vinyl LP)
2022
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.
Kazuki Tomokawa - A String of Paper Cranes Clenched between My Teeth (vinyl LP)
2022
Vinyl reissue of the third album of the Japanese "screaming philosopher" (1977), the culmination of his introspective approach to the search for a "music of the self".
Kazuki Tomokawa - Finally, His First Album (vinyl LP)
2022
Vinyl reissue of Kazuki Tomokawa's seminal album (1975), that introduced one of the most singular voices of the post-war Japanese music scene.
Kazuki Tomokawa - Straight from the Throat (vinyl LP)
2022
Vinyl reissue of Kazuki Tomokawa's second album (1976), having imposed him on the Japanese avant-garde/avant-folk scene.
Kazuki Tomokawa - 1975–1977 (Finally, His First Album / Straight from the Throat / A String of Paper Cranes Clenched between My Teeth) (3 CD box set)
2022
Box set gathering the first three albums of Kazuki Tomokawa (1975-1977), retracing the rise of the Japanese "screaming philosopher" and providing a complete introduction to his singular world, between folk experimentations, existential and introspective meditations and psychedelic rock.
Jerry Hunt - Partners - A Biography of Jerry Hunt
2021
English edition
The life and work of Amercian experimental musician/composer/intermedia artist Jerry Hunt (1943-1993)—an intimate portrait of a lifetime spent with one of the most eccentric figures in the world of new music
Kazuki Tomokawa - Try Saying You\'re Alive!
2021
English edition
A memoir by Kawasaki-based writer and musician Kazuki Tomokawa, Try Saying You're Alive! offers a semi-fictionalized account of the vibrant Tokyo underground that he has been at the center of since the 1970s.
Blank Forms - The Cowboy\'s Dreams of Home
2021
English edition
The seventh entry in an ongoing series of anthologies, this book features rare poems alongside new essays and interviews that engage the artists and themes explored elsewhere in Blank Forms' public programming: Terry Allen, Thulani Davis and Jessica Hagedorn, Sarah Hennies and Judith Hamann, Tashi Wada and Charles Curtis, Milford Graves, Graham Lambkin by Alan Licht, Still House Plants, Angel Bat Dawid...
Alan Licht - Common Tones - Selected interviews with artists and musicians 2000-2020
2021
English edition
The collection of previously unpublished interviews and extended versions of Alan Licht's famous conversations with figures in the American art and music scene (Vito Acconci, Matthew Barney, Rhys Chatham, Tony Conrad, Henry Flynt, Milford Graves, Christian Marclay, Phill Niblock, Suicide, Michael Snow, Tom Verlaine, Yo La Tengo...).
Moki Cherry - Blank Forms - Organic Music Societies
2021
English edition
(last copies available!)
Archival documents and new writings on the intermedia collaborations of avant-garde jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and textile artist Moki Cherry.
Don Cherry - Organic Music Theatre - Festival de jazz de Chateauvallon 1972 (CD)
2021
Don Cherry’s New Researches featuring Naná Vasconcelos.
Don Cherry - The Summer House Sessions (CD)
2021
Don Cherry's lost Summer House Sessions finally available over fifty years after they were recorded.
Catherine Christer Hennix - Blues Alif Lam Mim - Live in New York (2 vinyl LP)
2021
The first-time vinyl edition of CC Hennix's 2014 piece "Blues Alif Lam Mim in the Mode of Rag Infinity/Rag Cosmosis," intended to reveal the blues' origins in the eastern musical traditions of raga and makam.
Graham Lambkin - Solos (4 vinyl LP Box Set)
2021
Deluxe boxed set of Graham Lambkin's remastered first four solo records, including an expansive 42-page book with unseen photos and reproductions of artworks as well as essays and anecdotal recollections.
Maryanne Amacher - Selected Writings and Interviews
2021
English edition
The life and work of Maryanne Amacher are as vast as they are as yet unknown. Situated at the very onset of serious study of her papers, Amy Cimini and Bill Dietz offer a heterodox and idiosyncratic selection of largely unpublished documents spanning the bandwidth of the still unprocessed contents of the Amacher archive (new softcover edition).
Judith Hamann - Music for Cello and Humming (CD)
2021
Two pieces for cello and humming written specifically for Judith Hamann by composers Sarah Hennies and Anthony Pateras alongside Hamann's own “Humming Suite” and “Study for cello and humming.”
Catherine Christer Hennix - Karlheinz Stockhausen - Unbegrenzt – Aus den sieben Tagen / Unlimited – From the Seven Days (vinyl LP)
2020
C.C. Hennix realizes Karlheinz Stockhausen's famous “intuitive music” masterwork from the late Sixties.
Thulani Davis - Nothing but the Music
2020
English edition
(last copies available!)
Thulani Davis' collection of poetry about music.
Masayuki Takayanagi - Axis/Another Revolvable Thing 1 (vinyl LP)
2020
Reissue of a classic example of Masayuki Takayanagi's “non section music” from 1975.
Masayuki Takayanagi - Axis/Another Revolvable Thing 2 (vinyl LP)
2020
Reissue of a classic example of Masayuki Takayanagi's “non section music” from 1975.
Masayuki Takayanagi - Axis/Another Revolvable Thing 1 + 2 (2 CD)
2020
Reissue of a classic example of Masayuki Takayanagi's “non section music” from 1975.
Blank Forms - Aspirations of Madness
2020
English edition
Aspirations of Madness, Blank Forms' fifth collection of archival, unpublished, or newly translated texts, considers the work of Masayuki Takayanagi, the poet Louise Landes Levi, musician and writer Joseph Jarman, polymath Catherine Christer Hennix and her one-time student the poet Charles Stein, Russian musicologist Henry Orlov, and Maryanne Amacher—brilliant and overlooked artists whose work Blank Forms will continue to champion in a variety of contexts. Aspirations of Madness features additional contributions by Alan Cummings, Bill Dietz, Peter Kastakis, Art Lange, Leo Svirsky, Satoru Obara, and Tomoyuki Chida.
Loren Connors - Autumn\'s Sun
2019
English edition
The definitive edition of Loren Connors' texts.
Catherine Christer Hennix - Poësy Matters and Other Matters (2 vol.)
2019
English edition
The first comprehensive publication of the Swedish polymath Catherine Christer Hennix's written work in a two-volume set.
Joseph Jarman - Black Case Volume I and II - Return From Exile
2019
English edition
The republication in print form of the poems of Art Ensemble of Chicago's founding member breathes new life into a forgotten document of the Black Arts Movement.
Patty Waters - Live (vinyl LP)
2019
An exceptional live performance in which the legendary avant-garde jazz singer pays tribute to Cecil Taylor, Billie Holiday and Ornette Coleman.
Patty Waters - Live (CD)
2019
An exceptional live performance in which the legendary avant-garde jazz singer pays tribute to Cecil Taylor, Billie Holiday and Ornette Coleman.
Masayuki Takayanagi - April is the cruellest month (CD)
2019
Masayuki Takayanagi's legendary “lost” album.
Maryanne Amacher - Petra (CD)
2019
A unique example of Amacher's late work.
Wesley Brown - Blue in Green (paperback edition)
2023
English edition
forthcoming
Wesley Brown narrates the day when trumpeter Miles Davis was assaulted by the New York Police Department. A dramatic and humorous story, told from multiple perspectives including that of Frances Taylor, Davis's wife, and the musicians in Davis's bands: a timely meditation on the psychological impact of police brutality, through the lens of a day in the life of Miles Davis.
Don Cherry - Organic Music Theatre - Festival de jazz de Chateauvallon 1972 (2 vinyl LP)
2021
sold out
Don Cherry’s New Researches featuring Naná Vasconcelos.
Don Cherry - The Summer House Sessions (vinyl LP)
2021
sold out
Don Cherry's lost Summer House Sessions finally available over fifty years after they were recorded.
Judith Hamann - Shaking Studies (vinyl LP)
2021
sold out
A collection of iterative cello performance that foregrounds shaking as a generative subject and explores the harmonic pulses of the instrument.
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