Bøger udgivet af Blank Forms Editions

Conversations with the avant-garde's leading lights--from Suicide to Anohni--by experimental music's go-to interviewer, guitarist and sound artist Alan LichtFor the past 30 years, Alan Licht has been a performer, programmer and chronicler of New York's art and music scenes. His dry wit, deep erudition and unique perspective--informed by decades of experience as a touring and recording guitarist in the worlds of experimental music and underground rock--have distinguished him as the go-to writer for profiles of adventurous artists across genres. A precocious scholar and improvisor, by the time he graduated from Vassar College in 1990 Licht had already authored important articles on minimalist composers La Monte Young, Tony Conrad and Charlemagne Palestine, and recorded with luminaries such as Rashied Ali and Thurston Moore. In 1999 he became a regular contributor to the British experimental music magazine the Wire while continuing to publish in a wide array of periodicals, ranging from the artworld glossies to underground fanzines.Common Tones gathers a selection of never-before-published interviews, many conducted during the writing of Licht's groundbreaking profiles, alongside extended versions of his celebrated conversations with artists, previously untranscribed public exchanges and new dialogues held on the occasion of this collection. Even Lou Reed, a notoriously difficult interviewee, was impressed.Interviews by Alan Licht with Vito Acconci, ANOHNI, Cory Arcangel, Matthew Barney, Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, Tony Conrad, the Dream Syndicate's Karl Precoda, Richard Foreman, Henry Flynt, Milford Graves, Adris Hoyos, Ken Jacobs, Jutta Koether, Christian Marclay, Phill Niblock, Alessandra Novaga, Tony Oursler, Lou Reed, Kelly Reichardt, The Sea and Cake, Suicide, Michael Snow, Greg Tate, Tom Verlaine, Rudy Wurlitzer and Yo La Tengo's Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan.

"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 the New York loft jazz scene, offering a fascinating portrait of advanced music in Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan from the 1970s through the 1990s, including thrilling stories about the politically important Bed-Stuy venue The East and the author's tutelage under composer and long-time Archie Shepp collaborator Cal Massey."--

The first book on the art-world legend who installed his ephemeral sculptures on the streets of New York's East VillageCurtis Cuffie (1955-2002) was an artist from Harstville, South Carolina, who found local notoriety in the 1990s for the thrilling and surprising way he adorned the streets of New York's East Village. His on-the-spot sculptures were woven into fences, hung from walls and sprawled along the Bowery and Cooper Square.Making use of whatever he could find to fashion works that were imaginative and real, Cuffie took the street for all it could provide: materials, an audience, a rhythm and a sense of the strange unexpectedness of public life. He was unhoused for stretches of his life, and his sculptures were viewed near to his outdoor quarters. Cuffie's art was often removed by city sanitation, but new work would spring up soon after. Though little of his art survives today, a trove of photographs documenting it keeps him in the present.This publication, the first on Cuffie, seeks to honor the artist and rectify his omission by going backward to recover that which has been left behind. It places Cuffie's own photographs and those of his companion Katy Abel alongside pictures that photographers Margaret Morton and Tom Warren took of Cuffie and his art on the streets.

Archival documents and new writings on Jerry Hunt, video-art pioneer and electronic magusJerry Hunt (1943-93) is sometimes described as a shamanic figure with the look of a "Central Texas meat inspector." One of the most compelling composers in the word of late 20th-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, between Dallas, Waco, Houston and Austin, eventually settling in a house he built himself ("an interactive environment") on a ranch in Canton, but his pataphysical, abrasive and humorous performances took him all over North America and Europe, where he amassed a small but dedicated following.This volume represents the first ever book-length collection devoted to the underknown composer's work, and includes an introductory essay by Tyler Maxin and Lawrence Kumpf, interviews with Hunt, detailed analyses of his music and video practices, and remembrances and reflections on his work from his friends and collaborators. Given the diversity of Hunt's practice, this book will be of great interest to scholars, practitioners and enthusiasts in the fields of contemporary art, music and sound art, video and media, and performance. The publication is occasioned by a 2021 exhibition of Hunt's work at Blank Forms.

The amazing life of Jerry Hunt, Texan avant-garde composer, occultist and artist, with appearances from Pauline Oliveros, Karen Finlay and othersJerry Hunt (1943-93) was among the most eccentric figures in the word 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-cum-biography by Stephen Housewright, Hunt's partner of 35 years, offers illuminating depictions of Hunt's important installations and performances across North America and Europe. Housewright narrates a lifetime spent together, beginning in high school as a closeted couple in East Texas and ending with Hunt's battle with cancer and his eventual suicide, the subject of one of his most harrowing works of video art. This highly readable narrative contains many private correspondences with, and thrilling anecdotes about, Hunt's friends, family and collaborators, including Joseph Celli, Arnold Dreyblatt, Michael Galbreth, Karen Finley, James and Mary Fulkerson, Guy Klucevsek, Pauline Oliveros, Paul Panhuysen, Annea Lockwood and the S.E.M. Ensemble. This publication accompanies reissues of seven albums from Hunt's record label, Irida.

Writings and interviews engaging the artists and themes from Blank Forms' public programming, from Thulani Davis to Charles CurtisThis iteration privileges new texts produced for the publication. These include an interview with the idiosyncratic Texan singer-songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen, conducted by curator Anthony Elms; a conversation between writers--and longtime friends--Thulani Davis and Jessica Hagedorn, on the occasion of Davis' poetry collection Nothing But the Music; a discussion between composer Sarah Hennies and cellist Judith Hamann; and a conversation with composer-performers Tashi Wada and Charles Curtis, on the heels of a recent compilation of Curtis' work, Performances & Recordings 1998-2018, produced by Wada. Also featured are reflections on legendary jazz percussionist and healer Milford Graves, by Ciarán Finlayson; English multimedia artist Graham Lambkin's beguiling 2011 album Amateur Doubles, by Alan Licht; and the UK-based experimental music trio Still House Plants, by Joe Bucciero. The interviews and essays are complemented by three poets, René Daumal, Thulani Davis and Jessica Hagedorn.

The sounds of late '70s and '80s east coast avant-garde jazz, soul, and punk rock are well documented, but in Nothing but the Music Thulani Davis gives us something beyond, delivering a collection of synesthetic, transportive documentary poems that breathe anecdotal and impressionistic life into a sonic-social history about which most can only speculate. Davis' verse takes free flight with its muses, scatting and leaping off the page and the shoulders of the musicians, nightclubs, and choreographers she chronicles in these poems. Her odes both to recorded music and its sacred spaces of spirited encounter are at once a paean to ephemeral flashes of embodied experience and a work of preservation. Davis remembers to remember the raw feelings, smoke, dawn drunks, and impulsive energy of her moment, without forgetting its inscription into a broader political urgency. Written between 1974 and 1992, these poems are the most anthologized pieces of Davis' work, having appeared in numerous collections of writing on black music, here finally assembled for the first time. Nothing but the Music is further proof of Davis' place as a crucial figure, alongside poets Jayne Cortez, Sonia Sanchez, and Ntozake Shange, in the cultural landscape surrounding the Black Arts Movement. Featured musicians and dancers include Cecil Taylor, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Bad Brains, Henry Threadgill, Thelonious Monk, The Revolutionary Ensemble, The Commodores, MFSB, Dianne McIntyre, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and many more in performances at historic venues such as The Five Spot, The Village Vanguard, The Apollo, Storyville, and Club Harlem. With a foreword by Jessica Hagedorn and an introduction by Tobi Haslett. Thulani Davis (b. 1949) is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar whose work includes works of poetry, theater, journalism, history, and film. Her engagement with African American life, culture, and history is distinguished by poetic economy, passionate musicality, and an investigative concern for justice. While a student at Barnard College, the Virginia native was "schooled" for her first spoken word performance by Gylan Kain and Felipe Luciano of the Original Last Poets, jumpstarting a life of performance that would have her put words to music by Cecil Taylor, Joseph Jarman, Juju, Arthur Blythe, Miya Masaoka, David Murray, Henry Threadgill, Tania León, and others. Living in San Francisco in the '70s, she joined the Third World Artists Collective, collaborated with Ntozake Shange, and worked for the San Francisco Sun-Reporter, reporting on stories such as the Soledad Brothers trial and the Angela Davis case before returning to New York and continuing to incite radical political thought as a reporter and critic for the Village Voice for over a decade. This experience as a journalist blazes through her historical fiction and her other writing, breathing anecdotal life into the experiences of actors of American history who have remained unnamed as a result of bondage and other unjust erasures. Davis has collaborated with her cousin, composer Anthony Davis, writing the libretti for the operas X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X and Amistad, and wrote the scripts for the films Paid in Full and Maker of Saints, as well as several award-winning PBS documentaries. In 1993, her writing for Aretha Franklin's Queen of Soul - The Atlantic Recordings made her the first woman to win a Grammy for liner notes, and her bibliography additionally includes My Confederate Kinfolk, novels 1959 and Maker of Saints, and several works of poetry. She is an ordained Buddhist priest in the Jodo Shinshu sect, founded the Brooklyn Buddhist Association with her husband Joseph Jarman, and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Afro-American Studies and a Nellie Y. McKay Fellow at the University of Wisconsin. Davis continues to explore the relationship between music and language as well as the ways we define being American and deal with race with her forthcoming book The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom (Duke University Press) and poetry collection Nothing but the Music: Documentaries from Nightclubs, Lofts, Dance Halls & A Tailor's Shop in Dakar (Blank Forms Editions). Poet, novelist, playwright, and performer Jessica Hagedorn was born and raised in the Philippines and came to the United States in her early teens. She is the editor of numerous anthologies and author of several books including Dogeaters, winner of the American Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Award. In the seventies and early eighties, she collaborated with Thulani Davis on multimedia performance pieces presented at downtown venues such as The Public Theater and The Kitchen. Critic and essayist Tobi Haslett has written about art, film, and literature for n+1, the New Yorker, Artforum, the Village Voice, and elsewhere.

"Archival documents and new writings on the intermedia collaborations of avant-garde jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and textile artist Moki Cherry"--Publisher marketing.

In 1977, Art Ensemble of Chicago Publishing Co. published Jarman's Black Case, a collection of writing conceived across America and Europe between 1960 and 1975. Comprised largely of Jarman's flowing, fiery free verse--influenced by Amus Mor, Henry Dumas, Thulani Davis, and Amiri Baraka--the book also features a manifesto for "GREAT BLACK MUSIC," notated songs, concert program notes, Jarman's photos, and impressions of a play by Muhal Richard Abrams. Jarman writes poetry of personal revolutionary intent, aimed at routing his audience's consciousness towards growth and communication. He speaks with compassionate urgency of the struggles of growing up on Chicago's South Side, of racist police brutality and profound urban alienation, and of the responsibility he feels as a creative artist to nurture beauty and community through the heliocentric music that he considers the healing force of the universe. A practicing Buddhist and proponent of Aikido since a 1958 awakening saved him from the traumatic mental isolation of his time dropped by the US army into southeast Asia, Jarman sings praise for the self-awareness realization possible through the martial arts. With cosmic breath as its leitmotif, his poetry both encourages and embodies a complete relinquishing of ego. While some of the poems contained within Black Case have already been immortalized via performances on classic records by Jarman and Art Ensemble of Chicago, its republication in print form breathes new life into a forgotten document of the Black Arts Movement.

One of the world's most singular guitarists, Loren Connors has wrung distinct shades of ephemeral blues from his guitar, its sound ever-shifting while remaining unmistakably his own in more than 100 records across almost four decades. In the mid-80s, Connors took a partial break from music and focused instead on the art of haiku, for which he received the Lafcadio Hearn Award in 1987. With his wife Suzanne Langille he also co-wrote an article on blues and haiku, "The Dancing Ear," published in the Haiku Society of America's journal. It was during this period that Connors penned the material that appears in Autumn's Sun, a chapbook first published by Thurston Moore and Byron Coley's Glass Eye in 1999. The text features diary excerpts from 1987, lyrically fragmented observations interspersed with haiku-like poems that paint an idyllic impression of the passing seasons in his home of New Haven, Connecticut. With synesthetic perception, Connors gazes from tranquil domestic streets. Sycamore, elm, and catalpa trees are activated by the breeze and made to rustle in unison with their natural and artificial surroundings, including the howling dogs from which Connors derived his 'Mazzacane' moniker. As summer fades to winter, Connors portrays death as an undramatic certitude, the flux of his own maturation reflected in musings on his son's. Like his music, Autumn's Sun is tender without being sentimental, conjuring those rare, delicate moments when time stands still. This edition includes "The Dancing Ear" and an introduction by Lawrence Kumpf.

"Blank Forms' fifth collection of archival, unpublished, or newly translated texts, takes its title from a series of interviews with Japanese free jazz pioneer Masayuki Takayangi that were published in Japanese in 1975-76 and are published here in English for the first time. The interviews provide a rare look at Takayanagi's eccentric practice and personality, both long under-recognized by audiences outside (and often, inside) of Japan. In this respect, the interviews speak to the goals of Blank Forms' publication enterprise, that is, to expand upon our work in performance programming, record production, and archival preservation, and to foster new dialogues on vanguard art and music from the past 50-plus years. Aspirations of Madness considers the work of not just Takayanagi but also, in different ways, the poets Louise Landes Levi and Kazuko Shiraishi, the musician and writer Joseph Jarman, the polymath Catherine Christer Hennix and her one-time student the poet Charles Stein, the musicologist Henry Orlov, and Maryanne Amacher. Aspirations of Madness features additional contributions by Alan Cummings, Bill Dietz, Peter Kastakis, Art Lange, Satoru Obara, and Tomoyuki Chida ..."--Provided by publisher

This two-volume set, Poesy Matters and Other Matters, presents selected texts by the Swedish polymath Catherine Christer Hennix. Volume one, Poesy Matters, is divided into two sections: poetry and drama, with each section also containing pieces of commentary by Hennix or her longtime collaborator Henry Flynt. Volume two, Other Matters, is divided into two sections: first, program notes and essays about a wide range of topics (including music, psychoanalysis, and mathematics), and second, a reproduction of Hennix's 1989 work The Yellow Book. The first comprehensive publication of Hennix's written work, Poesy Matters and Other Matters illustrates the singular depth and variety of her contributions to contemporary music, art, literature, and mathematics. Best known as a composer, Catherine Christer Hennix has, throughout her fifty-plus-year career, produced innovative work in the fields of not just minimal and computer music, but psychoanalytic theory, intuition mathematics, poetry, and prose as well. The texts in Poesy Matters and Other Matters reflect Hennix's diverse training as well as her long-standing personal interests in Lacanian psychoanalysis and Japanese and Middle Eastern poetic forms, resulting in a rich, diffuse collection of writings that reveal one of the avant-garde's most implacable, not to mention overlooked, creative minds.