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
 
65 titles
Series:
 
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.
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
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.
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.
Maryanne Amacher - Petra (CD)
2019
A unique example of Amacher's late work.
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.
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.
Moki Cherry - Blank Forms - Organic Music Societies
2021
English edition
sold out
Archival documents and new writings on the intermedia collaborations of avant-garde jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and textile artist Moki Cherry.
Graham Lambkin - Solos (4 vinyl LP Box Set)
2021
sold out
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.
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.
Maryanne Amacher - Selected Writings and Interviews
2020
English edition
sold out
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 (hardcover edition).
Blank Forms - Intelligent Life
2019
English edition
sold out
The fourth issue of Blank Forms' journal: a kaleidoscopic view of the last fifty years of experimental art and music in the United States and beyond, mining the conceptual, technical, historical, or otherwise marginal details undergirding artists' lives, ideas, and approaches that may otherwise remain buried.
Masayuki Takayanagi - April is the cruellest month (CD)
2019
sold out
Masayuki Takayanagi's legendary “lost” album.
Maryanne Amacher - Petra (vinyl LP)
2019
sold out
This publication of Maryanne Amacher's 1991 piece Petra marks her first commercially available instrumental work as well as the first time her music has ever been available on vinyl— a unique example of Amacher's late work.
Henning Christiansen - Blank Forms - Freedom is Around the Corner
2018
English edition
sold out
Henning Christiansen: Freedom is Around the Corner, the third issue of Blank Forms' journal, is released in conjunction with a retrospective exhibition and performance series of the same name, devoted to the work of pioneering Danish composer and artist Henning Christiansen (1932–2008).
Blank Forms - Music From The World Tomorrow
2018
English edition
sold out
The second issue of Blank Forms' journal.
Loren Connors - Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Improvisations Vol. 10 (vinyl LP)
2018
sold out
First vinyl re-release of an essential record from Loren Connors' acoustic period.
Blank Forms
2017
English edition
sold out
The inaugural issue of Blank Forms' anthology, bringing together a combination of never-before published, lost, and new materials that supplement the non-profit's live programs. It is envisioned as a platform for critical reflection and extended dialogue between scholars, artists, and other figures working within the world of experimental music and art.
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