Blank Forms RADIO

'Finally, His First Album' is available at https://blankforms.org/publication/kazuki-tomokawa-finally-his-first-album-lp/, and as part of the Kazuki Tomokawa CD box set at
https://blankforms.org/publication/kazuki-tomokawa-kazuki-tomokawa-1975-1977/.

At the tender age of twenty-five, while he was working part-time at an Italian restaurant in Tokyo’s Kamata district, Kazuki Tomokawa released his debut record, fittingly titled Finally, His First Album. While he had already penned hundreds of songs, including his first single “Try Saying You’re Alive!,” written on a long train ride past fields and rice paddies, it was this  recording that introduced  Japan to one of its most unique musicians of the postwar era. Each track, as record label exec Kiichi Takahara writes in the LP’s liner notes (here translated for the first time), is not a song but a “flesh-and-blood human being,” birthed by the singer-songwriter and the raw, guttural cries that would become a hallmark of his incomparable sound.

1970s Japan was a time and place marked by a profound desire for authenticity amidst the onset of television and media saturation. Tomokawa arrived on the scene as a musician with“the personality of a hydrogen bomb,” to borrow a phrase from his frequent collaborator Toshi Ishizuka. In an unwieldy interview included here, members of the notorious leftist band Zun? Keisatsu (Brain Police) put it bluntly: here was a man surrounded by the “disingenuous,” the “wishy-washy,” and the “superficial,” who was delivering “real life, unvarnished.” These songs are lullabies for the lost, staring not into the void but—as the fourth track declares—from inside it.

Finally, His First Album is the first of three Tomokawa records to be reissued by Blank Forms Editions in conjunction with the US release of Tomokawa’s memoir, Try Saying You’re Alive!, the first-ever English translation of his writing. This debut captures the self-assured trademarks that Tomokawa would hone over the course of decades. Multiple tracks are performed in his native Akita dialect, a distinct and highly regional vernacular of northern Japan seldom heard outside the prefecture—and even more rarely heard in music. Tomokawa’s lyrics locate profound interiority in the rituals of everyday life, and are sung against sparse folk arrangements of tender, lilting chords—a prelude to the rock and electronic stylings to come in later years. A self-proclaimed “living corpse,” Tomokawa wallows, whispers, shouts, and cries, yet still, through his existential doubt, asks to be heard.

Kazuki Tomokawa (b. 1950) is a prolific singer-songwriter from Hachiryu Village (now the town of Mitane) in the Akita Prefecture area of northern Japan. Since his first release in 1975, he has recorded more than thirty albums. The 2010 documentary about his life, La Faute des Fleurs, won the Sound & Vision award at the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, and that same year saw the Japanese release of the book Dreams Die Vigorously Day by Day, a collection of his lyrics spanning forty years. His most recent albums are Vengeance Bourbon (2014) and Gleaming Crayon (2016), both on the Modest Launch label.

Kazuki Tomokawa - Protest, Age 23

'Straight from the Throat' is available at https://blankforms.org/publication/kazuki-tomokawa-straight-from-the-throat-lp/, and as part of the Kazuki Tomokawa CD box set at
https://blankforms.org/publication/kazuki-tomokawa-kazuki-tomokawa-1975-1977/.

In the 1970s, Kazuki Tomokawa catapulted into Tokyo’s avant-garde scene with his cathartic and utterly electrifying performances. Straight from the Throat, Tomokawa’s second album, released in July 1976 by Harvest Records, finds the musician in his truest form: as the “screaming philosopher” he would come to be called—cynical but fair, cheeky and melancholic, and looking at the world with truth-seeking eyes. 

In Straight from the Throat, Tomokawa shrieks and shouts and wallows with ritualistic abandon—his avant-folk stylings are cosmic and, at times, swell to ground-shaking rock. He speaks of adolescence, passing hearses, and wedding chapel cars in a poem to his younger brother, Tomoharu, and watches ice melt on the Mitane River with spring’s turn. Tomokawa’s sound is, as Kiichi Takahara would later dub it, “I-music”: revelatory and deeply intimate songs that turn to the everyday and the interior. They are portraits of a man in search of meaning, who is taking stubborn control of his life by doing so. As he croons in “The Spring Is Here Again Song,” “I’ll drink till I’ve had my fill / And fall in love until I die.”

Kazuki Tomokawa (b. 1950) is a prolific singer-songwriter from Hachiryu Village (now the town of Mitane) in the Akita Prefecture area of northern Japan. Since his first release in 1975, he has recorded more than thirty albums. The 2010 documentary about his life, La Faute des Fleurs, won the Sound & Vision award at the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, and that same year saw the Japanese release of the book Dreams Die Vigorously Day by Day, a collection of his lyrics spanning forty years. His most recent albums are Vengeance Bourbon (2014) and Gleaming Crayon (2016), both on the Modest Launch label.

Kazuki Tomokawa - Smithereens

Kazuki Tomokawa - Footbridge

'A String of Paper Cranes Clenched between My Teeth' is available at https://blankforms.org/publication/kazuki-tomokawa-a-string-of-paper-cranes-clenched-between-my-teeth-lp/, and as part of the Kazuki Tomokawa CD box set at
https://blankforms.org/publication/kazuki-tomokawa-kazuki-tomokawa-1975-1977/.

In a generation of musicians that came of age in postwar Japan, Kazuki Tomokawa stands as a pioneer of radical individualism, with a sound marked by shocking intimacy and blistering honesty. In his third album, A String of Paper Cranes Clenched between My Teeth, released by Harvest Records in 1977, Tomokawa creeps “ever more inward,” as Kiichi Takahara writes in the record’s original introductory text—embracing an attitude pervasive amongst musicians of the time who interrogated the prosaic and the profound alike, eschewing politics and society in favor of an “attitude of total self-containment.”

Tomokawa recorded the album over the course of a month—from August 24 to September 25, 1977—at Tokyo’s famed Onkio Haus studio in the bustling Ginza district. The arrangements, accordingly, are amped up: paired with the Black Panther Orchestra, Tomokawa’s “screaming philosopher” vocals find their match with the orchestra’s electric guitar, bass, piano, tuba, and ground-thumping drums played by the Brain Police’s Toshi Ishizuka—who appears on Tomokawa’s first three records and remains his collaborator to this day.

“This is Kazuki Tomokawa in the flesh,” concludes Takahara. A String of Paper Cranes Clenched between My Teeth is, in Tomokawa’s uncanny way, able to cut through facade and artifice in pursuit of truth. “You call that life?” he heckles, exhausted by the melodrama and nihilism of youth counterculture, “try saying you’re alive!”

Kazuki Tomokawa (b. 1950) is a prolific singer-songwriter from Hachiryu Village (now the town of Mitane) in the Akita Prefecture area of northern Japan. Since his first release in 1975, he has recorded more than thirty albums. The 2010 documentary about his life, La Faute des Fleurs, won the Sound & Vision award at the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, and that same year saw the Japanese release of the book Dreams Die Vigorously Day by Day, a collection of his lyrics spanning forty years. His most recent albums are Vengeance Bourbon (2014) and Gleaming Crayon (2016), both on the Modest Launch label.

Kazuki Tomokawa - The Donpan Song Goes off the Rails

Kazuki Tomokawa - Try Saying You're Alive!

To conclude “Coming Together: Attica 50 Years On,” Blank Forms presented a day-long May Day radio show commemorating the 1971 Attica rebellion. Celebrating the 50th anniversaries of both Archie Shepp’s Attica Blues and Frederic Rzewski’s compositions “Attica” and “Coming Together,” the show featured key compositions and political recordings from the 1970s, including a rare concert of Rzewski’s Attica works with Julius Eastman, Sonia Sanchez reading at the prison accompanied by incarcerated poets and musicians, and a post-mortem from Bobby Seale about his participation in negotiations at the prison. Hosts Ciarán Finlayson and Lawrence Kumpf interviewed Renée Levine Packer, author of This Life of Sounds: Evenings for New Music in Buffalo (Oxford University Press, 2010); Glo Harris, wife of Beaver Harris; and Michael J. Hull, director of the film Betrayal at Attica (2021) and custodian of the digital archive of Elizabeth Fink's Attica Brothers Legal Defense evidence collection—writer Isaac Brosilow conducted an interview with Joshua Melville, son of Attica Brother Sam Melville. This event was produced in conjunction with the New York University Steinhardt Department of Art and Art Professions.

Coming Together: A Mayday Broadcast

The Public's Not Ready For You Yet: A Cricket Radio Show

'May 99' out April 23, 2023

Cello: Charles Curtis
Guitar: Alan Licht
Electronics: Dean Roberts

Mixing by Jade Guterman
Mastering by Rashad Becker
Photos by Thomas Ankersmit
Design by Alec Mapes-Frances

https://www.blankforms.org/publications/charles-curtis-alan-licht-dean-roberts-may-99

https://blankformseditions.bandcamp.com/album/may-99

Charles Curtis, Alan Licht, Dean Roberts - May 99a (excerpt)

'Neo Seven' release date: July 28, 2023.

https://blankformseditions.bandcamp.com/album/neo-seven

https://www.blankforms.org/publications/7038634357-neo-seven

7038634357 - Perfect Night

Special guest shows from around the world.

https://www.nts.live/shows/guests/episodes/blank-forms-19th-may-2023

Blank Forms: Arbitrary Fun with Lawrence Kumpf and Lary 7 190523

7038634357 - Square Heart

'Solo for Tamburium' out September 9, 2023.

https://www.blankforms.org/publications/catherine-christer-hennix-solo-for-tamburium

https://blankformseditions.bandcamp.com/album/solo-for-tamburium

Catherine Christer Hennix - Solo For Tamburium (excerpt)

The Shadow Ring - Cape of Seaweed

The Shadow Ring - Put the Music In Its Coffin

The sophomore effort from Gray/Smith refines their petroleum-based, hard-lullaby sound with a decidedly dusty precision. To call this pair’s brand of country-rock détournement “cosmic” would be too breezy: L. Gray and Rob Smith prefer to stare into sunken depths, channeling their recondite affections for lay-by mauve zones and red-dirt guitar wanderings.  

Formed in the outer-edges of Kings and Richmond counties circa 2020, Gray/Smith is something of an East-Coast involution. L. Gray (guitar and vocals) and Rob Smith (drums, guitar and vocals) are both trusty veterans of “band’s bands” like Pigeons (Soft Abuse), No-Neck Blues Band (Revenant, Locust), Rhyton (Thrill Jockey), and The Suntanama (Drag City), freewheeling groups known for mining from polyglot sources: rough-hewn folk and the spiritual avant-garde, bargain-bin hard rock and and collector’s-choice psychedelia alike. On their first, self-released LP Gray/Smith, serendipitously recorded at Gary’s Electric at the top of 2021, the pair trained their assured chops onto the great American song-form, honing a murky but tight approach that variously cribs “urban cowboy” and finger-picked primitivism. A string of cryptic appearances soon followed, including a short-lived residency at a now-shuttered vodka dive; a micro-tour with Coloradan songstress Josephine Foster; and a series of backyard and barroom gigs sharing stages with compatriots like Stella Kola, Blues Ambush, Samara Lubelski, and Wednesday Knudsen. 

Heels in the Aisle is the slipshod, burnt-out, mid-’70s unter-prog comedown to their debut’s backwoods, bushy-tailed, early-’70s, country-rock meanderings—expect more unrestrained riffs, artful studio wizardry, and worn-down introspection. Joining the ranks of bloodshot-eyed, blues-rock medleys à la Canned Heat’s “Parthenogenesis” and Grand Funk’s “Into The Sun,” “The SDSPS” is the nearly side-length opening cut, an expanded song-cycle condensing and riffing on the themes of their debut. “Help Me” ventriloquizes Pomona College outlaw Kris Kristofferson’s slow-roaring ballad of libidinal woe. On the flip side, “Verrazano Tile” and the title track pay heed to lower bays of Staten Island, while their arrangement of the traditional Zimbabwean tune “Guabi Guabi” is a bright Dead/Feat-like jaunt with blissed-out wah-wah pay-off. “Gaslight Boulevard” is lean, mean, and eight-beers-in space rock, and the closing track “Kekule’s Ring” is a slack-jawed, wistful crash back down to earth. All this, packaged in a luxe, expertly-printed sleeve photographed by downtown artist Lary 7 and designed by Eric Wrenn (Sophie’s Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides). For fans of Meat Puppets, Ronnie Milsap, Traffic’s John Barleycorn Must Die, the oceanic ebullience of the sacred, and the salty tang of the profane.

Heels in the Aisle

Verrazano Tile

Jeffrey Perkins and Lawrence Kumpf on Terry Jennings, WNYU, June 22, 2016

Artist and filmmaker Jeffrey Perkins and Blank Forms artistic director Lawrence Kumpf on WNYU's "Termite Terrace" with Tyler Maxin to discuss the life & work of early minimalist composer Terry Jennings. 

Terry Jennings & John Cale - Improvisation 
John Tilbury - For Christine Jennings
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Charlemagne Palestine & Terry Jennings - Short & Sweet 
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Richard Maxfield - Bacchanale 
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Terry Riley performs two piano pieces by Terry Jennings 
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Poetry by Terry Jennings read by Jackson Mac Low, Marian Zazeela, La Monte Young 
La Monte Young & Terry Jennings - Improvisation 
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Tashi Wada - March 2007

Blank Forms #0: Terry Jennings

An excerpt of the premiere of Amacher's duo piano piece "Petra." Performed by Maryanne Amacher and Marianne Schroeder.

Maryanne Amacher — Petra, 1991, Boswil, CH (Excerpt)

An excerpt from Akaihirume and Carl Stone's radio spot on WNYU. The full set airs on Friday, March 24th at 7:30 PM on 89.1 FM NYC and wnyu.org.

Akaihirume + Carl Stone on WNYU (excerpt)

Produced in conjunction with Clocktower Radio (clocktower.org)

A conversation with Blank Forms' Lawrence Kumpf and art historian Branden W. Joseph on the New Zealand experimental music scene of the '80s and '90s onward, with a mix by the latter. In September 2016, Blank Forms presented a rare appearance from Dunedin's The Dead C at the First Unitarian Congregational Society, Brooklyn (9/20), and Christchurch's The Renderers outdoors of The Sump (9/23). 

Track listing: 
The Garbage and the Flowers - "Rosicrucian Lovers", Eyes Rind As If Beggers, The Now Sound, 1997
The Victor Dimisich Band - "Native Waiter", Native Waiter 7", Crawlspace, 1998 
Builders - "Kicks", Fïat Lux (Live 1980-82), Unwucht, 2014
Die Bilder -  "I Thought I Knew You", Schwimmen in Der See, Unwucht, 2012
Wreck Small Speakers on Expensive Stereos - "Until I Go (Edit)", A Child's Guide To...,  X-pressway, 1988 
Satan Rockers - "Magic Wandella", Fu King, Alberts Basement, 2013
The Dead C. - "Power (Fallujah Version)", Relax Fallujah - Hell Has Come 7", Ba Da Bing, 2006  
The Dead C - "Head", Tusk, Siltbreeze, 1997
Trash - "Heaviest Head", Gritt and Butts, Turbulence, 1992

Blank Forms : : Clocktower.org

Blank Forms #5: Erewhon Calling

This episode is a feature on visionary composer Maryanne Amacher and her piece Petra, 1991, originally commissioned for the ICSM World Music Days in Boswil, Switzerland. 

Maryanne Amacher was a composer of large-scale fixed-duration sound installations and a highly original thinker in the areas of perception, sound spatialization, creative intelligence, and aural architecture. She is frequently cited as a pioneer of what has come to be called “sound art,” although her thought and creative practice consistently challenges key assumptions about the capacities and limitations of this nascent genre. Often considered to be part of a post-Cagean lineage, her work anticipates some of the most important developments in network culture, media arts, acoustic ecology, and sound studies. 

Amacher’s 1991 piece Petra was originally commissioned for the ICSM World Music Days in Boswil, Switzerland. Written for two pianos, Petra is a unique example of Amacher’s late work, a direct extension of her working methodologies for electronic compositions taken into an acoustic realm that alludes to the music of Giacinto Scelsi and Galina Ustvolskaya. The piece is a sweeping, durational work based on both Amacher’s impressions of the church at Boswil and science-fiction writer Greg Bear’s short story of the same name, in which gargoyles come to life and breed with humans in a post-apocalyptic Notre Dame. 

In May 2017, Blank Forms presented the American premiere of Petra in New York with Marianne Schroeder, who originally performed the piece alongside Amacher in 1991, and Stefan Tcherepnin, who performed it alongside Schroeder in 2012 at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin.  This third-ever performance was an expanded version based on a newly discovered notes and scores from the Maryanne Amacher Archive. 

Artistic director of the Giacinto Scelsi Festival in Basel, Marianne Schroeder is a Swiss composer and pianist specializing in the interpretation of New Music. She has collaborated with and premiered work by John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Dieter Schnebel, Anthony Braxton, Morton Feldman, Pauline Oliveros and Giacinto Scelsi, with whom she studied. She is currently a professor at Hochschule der Künste Bern, and has also taught at the International Summer Courses in Darmstadt. 

Stefan Tcherepnin is an American electronic music performer, contemporary artist, and composer in fourth generation, continuing the family heritage of his great-grandfather Nicholas, grandfather Alexander, and father Ivan Tcherepnin. As a family friend of Amacher’s and a student of hers at Bard College he is uniquely qualified to navigate the labyrinth of Amacher interpretation. With kind support from the Consulate General of Switzerland in New York, Yamaha Artists Services and The Tin Man Fund.

You can see  Marianne Schroeder & Stefan Tcherepnin perform Petra live May 24, 2017 at St. Peter's Episcopal Church. Tickets for the performance can be purchased here

Blank Forms #11: Maryanne Amacher's Petra

Blank Forms' Lawrence Kumpf and Adrian Rew are joined by Graham Lambkin, Oliver Lambkin, and Joe McPhee for two hours of music and conversation surveying Graham and Joe's individual careers as well as the chance meetings that prompted their collaborative practice.

Joe McPhee has been a deeply emotional composer, improviser, and multi-instrumentalist since his emergence on the creative jazz and new music scenes in the late 60s. Inspired by the music of Albert Ayler, he taught himself the saxophone and proceeded to cut two records that remain defining monuments to the civil rights era: the out free jazz of Underground Railroad and avant-funk of Nation Time. His odyssey since has taken McPhee through Deep Listening collaborations with Pauline Oliveros and countless left field improv sessions both within and way outside of the jazz tradition. Graham Lambkin is a multidisciplinary artist who first came to prominence in the early 90s through the formation of his experimental music group The Shadow Ring. A sound organizer rather than music maker, Lambkin looks at an everyday object and sees an ocean of possibility, continually transforming quotidian atmospheres and the mundane into expressive sound art using tape manipulation techniques, chance operations and the thick ambience of domestic field recordings.

In 1993 one of the chief concerns of Graham Lambkin’s then fledgling Shadow Ring was to emulate, on a cheap Casio keyboard, the electronic textures of ’70s Joe McPhee collaborator John Snyder’s ARP synthesizer. Twenty-two years later Lambkin and McPhee recorded their Chance Meeting album using chimes, whistle, pocket synthesizer, tape, Baoding balls and other objects. The recording is marked by the jovial spirit and wry humor that characterizes their collaborative dynamic, both in performance and friendship. Self-reflexively commenting on the process of creation as it unfolds, their weeklong residency will provide a rare public forum for the latest chapter of the Lambkin-McPhee drama. They now happily share the same branch of Stop & Shop in Poughkeepsie, NY and Prismatic Park will mark the fourth of their public appearances as a duo.

Lambkin & McPhee's Prismatic Park residency runs from July 25th to July 29th, 2017 at Madison Square Park. It is free and open to the public.

Blank Forms #18: Graham Lambkin & Joe McPhee, Prismatic Park

Rare interview with Maryanne Amacher on WFMT radio, conducted in 1974 preceding performances of City-Links and Everything in Air at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Amacher discusses her telematic music, recordings of piers, and “no more horse”—the idea that antiquated forms of music with rhythms based on horses’ gallops have been replaced by a new minimalism.

Maryanne Amacher 1974 WFMT Radio Interview

Organ

Jun Konagaya - Schlafen (2012)

A conversation between scholar and historian Amy Cimini, Yarn/Wire percussionist and Adjacencies interpreter Russell Greenberg, and Lawrence Kumpf situating Maryanne Amacher’s "Adjacencies" within the lineage of her larger body of work. They discuss the practical challenges surrounding the interpretation and re-staging of the piece 51 years after its last performance and play a variety of pertinent audio, including a rehearsal recording of "Adjacencies"’ original performance by Jan Williams and Edward Burnham, audio research material used as a model for its reinterpretation, and a selection from the later piece "City-Links..: Buffalo" demonstrating Amacher’s practice of recycling audio material from earlier work.

Blank Forms #21: Maryanne Amacher's Adjacencies

Blank Forms' Lawrence Kumpf is joined by composer Tashi Wada for a show surveying Wada's work and methodology of the past decade. They discuss Wada's time and studies with James Tenney at CalArts, his early forays into just intonation, and his close collaborations with cellist Charles Curtis and his father Yoshi Wada.

Tashi Wada is a Los Angeles-based composer and performer whose works explore harmonic overtones, resonance, and dissonance through precise tuning and a gradual change in pitch. Grounded in a belief that “music should be as direct as possible,” his compositions use apparently simple structures to generate rich and unanticipated perceptual effects. Working in relation to American experimental music, microtonal music, and so-called drone music, Wada’s practice is also informed by interdisciplinary performance and Fluxus-affiliated artists. He studied composition at CalArts with James Tenney and for many years has performed alongside his father, composer Yoshi Wada.

Blank Forms Radio

Blank Forms #22: Tashi Wada

Maryanne Amacher's Petra, available for pre-order here: https://blankforms.org/publications/

Maryanne Amacher (1938 - 2009) was a composer of large-scale fixed-duration sound installations and a highly original thinker in the areas of perception, sound spatialization, creative intelligence, and aural architecture. She is frequently cited as a pioneer of what has come to be called “sound art,” although her thought and creative practice consistently challenge key assumptions about the capacities and limitations of the genre. Amacher’s work anticipates some of the most important developments in network culture, media arts, acoustic ecology, and sound studies, yet due to its expansive interdisciplinary nature it has rarely been documented. Following two CDs for Tzadik and her inclusion in the monumental collection OHM: The Early Gurus Of Electronic Music (1948-1980), this publication of 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.

Petra was originally commissioned for the ICSM World Music Days in Boswil, Switzerland. Written for two pianos, the piece is a unique example of Amacher’s late work, a direct extension of her working methodologies for electronic composition taken into an acoustic realm that alludes to the music of Giacinto Scelsi and Galina Ustvolskaya. Petra is a sweeping, durational work based on both Amacher’s impressions of the church at Boswil and science-fiction writer Greg Bear’s short story of the same name, in which gargoyles come to life and breed with humans in a post-apocalyptic Notre Dame.

This solemn interpretation of Petra was recorded at its 2017 American premiere at New York’s St. Peter’s Episcopal Church with pianists Marianne Schroeder, who originally performed the piece alongside Amacher in 1991, and Stefan Tcherepnin, who performed it alongside Schroeder in 2012 at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. Weighing tranquilizing passages of glacially-paced serenity against stretches of dilapidated, jagged dissonance, the recording illuminates a crucial node in the constellation of Amacher’s enigmatic oeuvre.

Artistic director of the Giacinto Scelsi Festival in Basel, Marianne Schroeder is a Swiss composer and pianist specializing in the interpretation of New Music. She has collaborated with and premiered work by John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Dieter Schnebel, Anthony Braxton, Morton Feldman, Pauline Oliveros and Giacinto Scelsi, with whom she studied. She is currently a professor at Hochschule der Künste Bern, and has also taught at the International Summer Courses in Darmstadt.

Stefan Tcherepnin is an American electronic music performer, contemporary artist, and composer in fourth generation, continuing the family heritage of his great-grandfather Nicholas, grandfather Alexander, and father Ivan Tcherepnin. As a family friend of Amacher’s and a student of hers at Bard College he is uniquely qualified to navigate the labyrinth of Amacher interpretation.

Maryanne Amacher: Petra excerpt 1

Selections from 100 Models of Hegikan Roku is the second in an ongoing series of archival records of the unheard music of Swedish composer, philosopher, poet, mathematician, and visual artist Catherine Christer Hennix, co-released by Blank Forms Editions and Empty Editions. It follows last year’s Selected Early Keyboard Works and anticipates Blank Forms’ publication of Poësy Matters and Other Matters, a two-volume collection of Hennix’s writing.

Upon her return to Sweden from New York in 1971, Hennix sought to form a large ensemble inspired by her encounters with La Monte Young and recordings by the Theatre of Eternal Music. She enlisted her brother Peter Hennix, Hans Isgren, and a dozen Swedish jazz musicians she had previously worked with, naming the group and its pieces of music after the time and days of the week according to the Angus Maclise calendar (e.g. “The Pointed Time Bus”). Frustrated with the jazz musicians’ inability to comprehend and play the intervals of just intonation, she pared the group down to the trio of herself, her brother, and Isgren and christened the live-electronic ensemble The Deontic Miracle. 

In 1976 The Deontic Miracle performed Hennix’s original compositions, alongside works by La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Terry Jennings, as part of Brouwer’s Lattice at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. With Hennix on amplified Renaissance oboe, live electronics, and sine wave generators, her brother on amplified Renaissance oboe, and Isgren on amplified sarangi, the recordings presented here of the group’s first and only public concert see them channeling late period John Coltrane and the sopranino and soprano saxophone playing of La Monte Young and Terry Jennings in the Theatre of Eternal Music. With titles taken from Japanese Gagaku, “Music of Auspicious Clouds” and “Waves of the Blue Sea” are expansive drone improvisations, breathing with the pulsating lull of cicadas’ organic sonic latticework. Now accessible for the first time, these recordings by what Hennix has called “the most rejected band ever formed in Sweden” continue to fill gaps of silence from a figure whose work has until recently remained flickering at the margins of some of the most enduring cultural developments of the 20th century.

Catherine Christer Hennix (b. 1948) started her creative career playing drums with her older brother Peter growing up in Sweden where she saw jazz luminaries such as John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Dexter Gordon, Archie Shepp, and Cecil Taylor perform at the Golden Circle. Directly after high school, Hennix went to work at Stockholm’s pioneering Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), where she helped develop early synthesizer and tape music. After traveling to New York In 1968, she met Fluxus artists Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles and developed fruitful collaborative relationships with many composers in the burgeoning American avant-garde, including, most significantly, Henry Flynt and La Monte Young. Young introduced Hennix to Hindustani raga master Pandit Pran Nath, and she would later study intensively under him. While Hennix continued to make music performing alongside Arthur Russell, Marc Johnson, Henry Flynt, and Arthur Rhames, she also served as a professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at SUNY New Paltz and as a visiting Professor of Logic (at Marvin Minsky’s invitation) at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In recent years Hennix has led the just-intonation ensemble the Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage. She currently resides in Berlin, Germany, where she is active as a composer and writer.

The Deontic Miracle: Music Of Auspicious Clouds (excerpt)

Full LP available at blankforms.org/publications/

Unbegrenzt is the third in an ongoing series of archival records of the unheard music of Swedish composer Catherine Christer Hennix, co-released by Blank Forms Editions and Empty Editions. It follows Selected Early Keyboard Works and Selections from 100 Models of Hegikan Roku (named the #1 archival release of 2019 by The Wire), in addition to a two-volume collection of Hennix’s writing titled Poësy Matters and Other Matters.

Recorded in February of 1974 and featuring Catherine Christer Hennix (recitation, percussion, and electronics) and Hans Isgren (bowed gong), Hennix’s realization of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Unbegrenzt” (German for “unlimited”) from Aus den Sieben Tagen is an elaboration both rigorous and radically different from the canonical 1969 recording issued by Shandar. The collection of 15 text pieces written in Paris during May of 1968, Aus den Sieben Tagen, denies its performers notated direction and instead provides poetic cues that hinge upon Stockhausen’s conception of “intuitive music,” a Eurocentric perspective on improvisation antithetical to the vernacular forms Hennix had engaged with as a young drummer performing in Stockholm jazz clubs with musicians like Bill Barron, Cam Brown, Hans Isgren, Lalle Svenson, Allan Vajda, Bo Wärmell, and many others. While both Hennix and Isgren saw the formal prospect of Aus den Sieben Tagen as a productive development of and beyond La Monte Young’s event scores, she here steadfastly counters his rationalization of intuition with the Principle of Sufficient Reason. (Cf. Brouwer’s Lattice.) Eschewing the busy, conservatory-addled lapses into idiomatic citation of Stockhausen’s 1969 recording, Hennix’s alternative realization of the “Unbegrenzt” score’s instructions to “play a sound with the certainty that you have an infinite amount of time and space” is based on her concept of Infinitary Compositions, the trademark of her ensemble The Deontic Miracle which, at one time, considered adding Stockhausen, La Monte Young and Terry Jennings scores to its repertoire. Taking a mature, minimal iteration of Stockhausen’s compositional method of “moment-forming” to heart, her version’s dark, controlled feedback and amplified bowed gong subtly shift through an immanent sequence of formative moments, step by step. Its bubbling computer noise, percussion, and repeated ominous transient sounds of temple blocks over the bowed gong terminate with the integrated recitation of exotic text fragments from Hevajra Tantra which faithfully take Stockhausen’s score into deeper vistas of the unconscious and a more devastating opening to the unlimited time and space of a dreaming mind.

Audio restoration and mastering by Stephan Mathieu, with an essay by Bill Dietz.

Catherine Christer Hennix: Unbegrenzt (excerpt)

Music for Cello and Humming is available at https://blankforms.org/publication/judith-hamann-music-for-cello-and-humming-cd/

For her first album releases as a soloist, nomadic Australian cellist and composer Judith Hamann presents two collections of her sonic inquiries into shaking and humming. Her CD, Music for Cello and Humming, features two pieces for cello and humming written specifically for Hamann by composers Sarah Hennies and Anthony Pateras alongside Hamann’s own “Humming Suite” and “Study for cello and humming.” Having arisen intuitively from Hamann’s investigations into shaking, just intonation, psychoacoustic phenomena, and the voice in relation to the femme presenting body in performance, humming here also references dislocation, or ventriloquism.  Although teetering on the edge of audibility, the intimate and vulnerable closed-mouth sounding enters into subtle interference with her cello, drifting into acoustical beating and bringing instability to otherwise more formal grid structures. The capacity for rupture of this volatile fragility reaches its apotheosis on Hennies’ “Loss,” a piece that deliberately instructs Hamann to hum beyond the limits of her voice range. Going against the grain of chamber music orthodoxy, the guaranteed failure set in motion by this instruction yields a generative sound of effort reminiscent of Xenakis’ storied desire for an instrumentalist to play with the sorrow of knowing they can’t do everything. With an arc suggestive of sudden life change, “Loss” casts queer epistemology onto composition, positioning failure, undoing, unbecoming, and transforming as alternative ways of knowing or being. Hennies’ signature composite merging of individual components here brings oral sounds that include breathing and coughing together with humming, cello, and sine waves. Like Glenn Gould’s 1982 Goldberg Variations or Pauline Oliveros’ Accordion and Voice, this timbral meeting of bodily utterances with consummate musicianship imbues Hamann’s humming work with a breakable, human strand, here as humbling as it is uncomfortable.

Music for Cello and Humming‘s sister release, Shaking Studies, is also available. Music for Cello and Humming is accompanied by an essay on both recordings by Nora Fulton.

Judith Hamann undertook her doctoral studies with renowned cellist Charles Curtis, with whom she is currently engaged in a discourse based project, ‘Materialities of Realisation.’ She has additionally demonstrated a superlative capacity for improvisation and engagement with sonic arts through work with artists Dennis Cooper, Éliane Radigue, Áine O’Dwyer, Ilan Volkov, Toshimaru Nakamura, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, Golden Fur, Jessika Kenney, Anna Homler, Yvette Janine Jackson, and Lori Goldston, among others. Her recorded appearances include Tashi Wada’s Duets, Graham Lambkin’s Community, Alvin Lucier’s Illuminated By The Moon, and Gossamers, with Rosalind Hall.

Judith Hamann - Humming Suite III - Harmonics Étude For One Cello And One Voice

Shaking Studies is available at https://blankforms.org/publication/judith-hamann-shaking-studies-lp/

For her first album releases as a soloist, nomadic Australian cellist and composer Judith Hamann presents two collections of her sonic inquiries into shaking and humming. Her LP, Shaking Studies, is a collection of iterative cello performance that foregrounds shaking as a generative subject. In addition to an arsenal of techniques for registrable shaking, Hamann’s conception of the term emphasizes micro and macro pulsing, including tremors, vibrato, wolf tones, and complex partial activity. Hamann begins with a sphygmological reading of the pulse of her cello, inciting it to shake audibly and visually as a symbiotic basis for determining the rate of her own left hand’s tremor and consequent direction of resonant frequencies. Following a thorough harmonic investigation of her shaking practice in two parts, she directs us to look outwards, combining beating chordal structures with electronics and recordings of real world shaking. From inner pulse to more macrocosmic quaking, Hamann’s alternative conception of shaking rejects measurement and regularity, order and control, instead alluding to a more responsive and intuitive mode of convulsive sounding.

Judith Hamann undertook her doctoral studies with renowned cellist Charles Curtis, with whom she is currently engaged in a discourse based project, ‘Materialities of Realisation.’ She has additionally demonstrated a superlative capacity for improvisation and engagement with sonic arts through work with artists Dennis Cooper, Éliane Radigue, Áine O’Dwyer, Ilan Volkov, Toshimaru Nakamura, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, Golden Fur, Jessika Kenney, Anna Homler, Yvette Janine Jackson, and Lori Goldston, among others. Her recorded appearances include Tashi Wada’s Duets, Graham Lambkin’s Community, Alvin Lucier’s Illuminated By The Moon, and Gossamers, with Rosalind Hall.

Shaking Studies‘ sister release, Music for Cello and Humming, includes an essay on both recordings by Nora Fulton.

Judith Hamann - The Tender Interval

'Organic Music Theatre: Festival de jazz de Chateauvallon 1972' is available at https://blankforms.org/publication/don-cherrys-new-researches-featuring-nana-vasconcelos-organic-music-theatre-festival-de-jazz-de-chateauvallon-1972/

In the late 1960s, the American trumpet player and free jazz pioneer Don Cherry (1936–1995) and the Swedish visual artist and designer Moki Cherry (1943–2009) began a collaboration that imagined an alternative space for creative music, most succinctly expressed in Moki’s aphorism “the stage is home and home is a stage.” By 1972, they had given name to a concept that united Don’s music, Moki’s art, and their family life in rural Tagårp, Sweden into one holistic entity: Organic Music Theatre. Captured here is the historic first Organic Music Theatre performance from the 1972 Festival de jazz de Chateauvallon in the South of France, mastered from tapes recorded during its original live broadcast on public TV. A life-affirming, multicultural patchwork of borrowed tunes suffused with the hallowed aura of Don’s extensive global travels, the performance documents the moment he publicly jettisoned his identity as a jazz musician, and represents the start of his communal “mystical” period, later crystallized in recordings such as Organic Music Society, Relativity Suite, Brown Rice, and the soundtrack for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain (1973).

The musicians in Don Cherry’s New Researches, hailing from Brazil, Sweden, France, and the US, converged on Chateauvallon from all over Europe. The five-person band—Don and Moki Cherry, Christer Bothén, Gérard “Doudou” Gouirand, and Naná Vasconcelos— performed in an outdoor amphitheater and were joined onstage by a dozen adults and children, including Swedish friends who tagged along for the trip and Det Lilla Circus (The Little Circus), a Danish puppet troupe based in Christiania, Copenhagen. The platform was lined with Moki’s carpets and her handmade, brightly colored tapestries, depicting Indian scales and bearing the words Organic Music Theatre, dressed the stage. As the musicians played, members of Det Lilla, led by Annie Hedvard, danced, sang, and mounted an improvised puppet show on poles high up in the air.

The music in the Chateauvallon concert aspired to a universal language that purposefully sought to bring people together through song. In a fairly unprecedented move, Don abandoned his signature pocket trumpet for the piano and harmonium, thereby liberating his voice as an instrument for shamanic guidance. The show opens with him beckoning the audience to clap their hands and sing the indian theta “Dha Dhin Na, Dha Tin Na,” and the set cycles through uplifting and sacred tunes of Malian, South African, Brazilian, and Native American provenance—including pieces that would later appear on Don’s albums Organic Music Society and Home Boy (Sister Out)—all punctuated by outbursts of possessed glossolalia fromm the puppeteers. “Relativity Suite, Part 1” notably spotlights Bothén on donso ngoni, a Malian hunter’s guitar, prior to Vasconcelos taking an extended solo on berimbau. A vortex of wah-like microtonal rattling, Vasconcelos’s masterful demonstration of the single-stringed Brazilian instrument is a harbinger of his work with Don to come as the acclaimed Codona. The sounds of children playing on the ensemble’s achingly tender rendition of Jim Pepper’s oft-covered beacon of spiritual optimism, “Witchi Tai To,” lends the proceedings an especially intimate, domestic glow. Given the context of the star-studded international jazz festival, the Cherrys’ laid back, communal vibe feels like an attempt to show Don’s jazz audience that he was moving on. But at the same time, it was also a warmhearted invitation for them to come along for the ride.

Don Cherry's New Researches featuring Naná Vasconcelos - Ganesh

Don Cherry's New Researches featuring Naná Vasconcelos - Interlude With Puppets

'Blues Alif Lam Mim' is available at https://blankforms.org/publication/chorassan-time-court-mirage-blues-alif-lam-mim-2xlp/

Having already unearthed three collections of archival ‘70s recordings by Catherine Christer Hennix, Blank Forms continues our annual illumination of the visionary Swedish composer’s music by turning to more recent work with this first-time vinyl edition of Hennix’s “Blues Alif Lam Mim in the Mode of Rag Infinity/Rag Cosmosis,” a 2014 piece first released as a CD in 2016.

The double album captures the April 22, 2014 premiere of Hennix's composition by the Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage, her expanded just intonation ensemble, featuring a brass section of Amir ElSaffar, Paul Schwingenschlögl, Hilary Jeffery, Elena Kakaliagou, and Robin Hayward; live electronics by Stefan Tiedje and Marcus Pal; and voice by Amirtha Kidambi, Imam Ahmet Muhsin Tüzer, and Hennix herself. Intended to reveal the blues’ origins in the eastern musical traditions of raga and makam, “Blues Alif Lam Mim in the Mode of Rag Infinity/Rag Cosmosis” has its roots in Hennix’s 2013 realization of an “Illuminatory Sound Environment,” a concept developed in 1978 by anti-artist Henry Flynt on the basis of Hennix’s own “The Electric Harpsichord.”

As Hennix explains in Other Matters, Blank Forms’ 2019 collection of her writings:

“Rag Infinity/Rag Cosmosis presents fragments of 'raga-like’ frequency constellations following distinct cycles and permuting their order, creating a simultaneity of ‘multi-universes.’ When two such ‘universes’ come in proximity of each other and begin unfolding simultaneously along distinct cycles, there is a kaleidoscopic exfoliation of frequencies as one universe is becoming two, but not separated—the effect of cosmosis is entrained, binding two or more frequency universes into proximity where their modal properties interact and blend, creating in the process entirely new microtonal constellations in an omnidirectional simultaneous cosmic order with phenomenologically ‘transfinite’ Poincaré cycles (cyclic returns to initial conditions).”

As with Hennix’s best work, the organic unfolding of this quivering drone belies a precision that opens onto the infinitesimal. Upon its mesmerizing ebb and flow, the vocalists incant a devotional poem written in Arabic by Hennix and featuring quotations from the Quran. Also reproduced on the album’s gatefold jacket, Hennix’s reduction of the sacred text to its most elegant formulation invites the contemplator to bring their inner knowledge to the composition for use as a prompt for meditation. Yet the piece offers depth to even the most secular listener willing to immerse themselves in music brimming with such serene intensity.

Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage - Blues Alif Lam Mim Side C

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