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, Ciarán Finlayson, 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, and Mónica de la Torre.
 
New York
 
63 titles
Series:
 
 Atrás del Cosmos - Cold Drinks, Hot Dreams (vinyl LP)
2024
forthcoming
Issued on LP for the first time, Atrás del Cosmos's Cold Drinks, Hot Dreams,, originally issued on cassette in 1980, is a heady and lush live set by who many consider to be the first free jazz ensemble in Mexico.
James Rushford - Turzets (vinyl LP)
2024
forthcoming
Turzets collects a pair of new works primarily created and recorded in 2023 while the Australian composer-performer was in residence at La Becque, an art center on Lake Geneva in Switzerland: somewhat a departure for Rushford, working in traces of Klaus Schulze, concrete poetry, and ars subtilior into a precise and ever-unfolding tapestry.
Steve Cannon - Groove, Bang and Jive Around
2024
English edition
forthcoming
New edition of Steve Cannon's riotous 1969/71 erotic novel Groove, Bang and Jive Around, "an underground classic of such legendary stature that New York's black cognoscenti have transmogrified the work into urban myth," with a foreword from Darius James and an afterword by poet Tracie Morris.
 The Shadow Ring - The Shadow Ring (1992-2002) (11 CD + DVD + book box set)
2024
forthcoming
A comprehensive overview of the work produced by British musicians Graham Lambkin, Darren Harris, and later Tim Goss over the course of a decade, across eleven CDs and a DVD, accompanied by an nearly five-hundred-page book.
Catherine Christer Hennix - Solo for Tamburium (2 vinyl LP)
2024
forthcoming
Solo for Tamburium captures Catherine Christer Hennix's most recent major work. Hennix plays an instrument of her own creation, a keyboard interface controlling a suite of eighty-eight recordings of precision-tuned tambura, creating a sweeping and continuous flow of rich harmonic interplay.
Catherine Christer Hennix - Solo for Tamburium (CD)
2024
forthcoming
Solo for Tamburium captures Catherine Christer Hennix's most recent major work. Hennix plays an instrument of her own creation, a keyboard interface controlling a suite of eighty-eight recordings of precision-tuned tambura, creating a sweeping and continuous flow of rich harmonic interplay.
Wesley Brown - Blue in Green (paperback edition)
2023
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.
Blank Forms - Sound Signatures
2023
English edition
currently out of stock
The penultimate Blank Forms anthology presents new, in-depth interviews with musicians Theo Parrish, Amelia Cuni, Akio Suzuki, and more.
Tori Kudo - Ceramics
2023
English edition
currently out of stock
Tori Kudo's ceramics.
Moki Cherry - Blank Forms - Organic Music Societies
2023
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.
 7038634357 - Neo Seven (vinyl LP)
2023
currently out of stock
7038634357 (Neo Gibson)'s first vinyl record, between soundscape, song, and silence.
Dean Roberts - May 99 (vinyl LP)
2023
29.00 26.90 €
The experiments of three musicians with different backgrounds who improvise together around continuous sinusoidal waves, between minimal and rock sensibilities.
Graham Lambkin - Aphorisms (2 vinyl LP)
2023
Graham Lambkin (of Shadow Ring fame) returns with a long awaited epic double LP, Aphorisms, his first major solo outing since 2016, continuing his synthetic-naturalist approach to sound-making, twisting disparate and unique elements together to create the sensation of a coherent sonic space.
Graham Lambkin - Aphorisms (2 CD)
2023
currently out of stock
Graham Lambkin (of Shadow Ring fame) returns with a long awaited epic double LP, Aphorisms, his first major solo outing since 2016, continuing his synthetic-naturalist approach to sound-making, twisting disparate and unique elements together to create the sensation of a coherent sonic space.
Graham Lambkin - The Cat & Bells Club (vinyl LP)
2023
The very first completely handmade and almost unreleased recordings of Graham Lambkin and Darren Harris under the name of Cat & Bells Club, prefiguring The Shadow Ring.
 Lary 7 - Larynx (2 vinyl LP)
2023
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.
Louis Reyes Rivera - A Strange Celestial Road - My Time in the Sun Ra Arkestra
2023
English edition
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.
Curtis Cuffie -
2023
English edition
The first book on the art-world legend who installed his ephemeral sculptures on the streets of New York's East Village.
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 (CD)
2022
currently out of stock
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 (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.
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...).
Don Cherry - The Summer House Sessions (CD)
2021
currently out of stock
Don Cherry's lost Summer House Sessions finally available over fifty years after they were recorded.
Don Cherry - Organic Music Theatre - Festival de jazz de Chateauvallon 1972 (CD)
2021
Don Cherry’s New Researches featuring Naná Vasconcelos.
Catherine Christer Hennix - Blues Alif Lam Mim - Live in New York (2 vinyl LP)
2021
currently out of stock
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.
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
currently out of stock
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.
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