Blank Forms RADIO

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

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

Produced in conjunction with Clocktower Radio (clocktower.org).

Anticipating a concert by Chinese pipa/cello experimentalist Li Daiguo and the duo of Che Chen and David Watson at Bridget Donahue on November 17, 2016, Blank Forms' Lawrence Kumpf was joined by Watson for a survey of music surrounding the performers' work. They play selections from Chen's collaboration with Chie Mukai, Watson's records with Alastair Galbraith and Jean Jacques Palix, live recordings of the Watson/Chen duo itself and a selection of pieces by Li Daiguo.

Blank Forms : : Clocktower.org

Blank Forms #6: Li Daiguo, Che Chen and David Watson

Produced in conjunction with Clocktower Radio (clocktower.org). 

In preparation for a forthcoming project on Henning Christiansen (1932-2008), Blank Forms' Lawrence Kumpf and Adrian Rew present an overview of the Danish composer and Fluxus artist's eccentric career. The three-hour program covers work ranging from Christiansen's pioneering contributions to Denmark's New Simplicity movement to his happenings with Joseph Beuys, organ music, impressions of Satie, and songs of ritual sacrifice. Part 1 takes a general look at the diversity of his practice throughout the years.

Blank Forms #7: The Henning Christiensen Trilogy Part 1

In preparation for a forthcoming project on Henning Christiansen (1932-2008), Blank Forms' Lawrence Kumpf and Adrian Rew present an overview of the Danish composer and Fluxus artist's eccentric career. 

The three-hour program covers work ranging from Christiansen's pioneering contributions to Denmark's New Simplicity movement through to his happenings with Joseph Beuys, organ music, impressions of Satie, and songs of ritual sacrifice. Part 3 considers Christiansen's recycled use of past recordings in later contexts.

Blank Forms #9: The Henning Christiensen Trilogy Part 3

Produced in conjunction with Clocktower Radio (clocktower.org).

This week Blank Forms' Lawrence Kumpf and Arian Rew dedicate the hour to avant-garde vocalist Phew whose eclectic career has consistently attracted collaborations with the cream of her contemporaries in left-field popular music. 

She started her first group Aunt Sally after attendening a Sex Pistols show, An Osaka art-punk band releasing one coveted album on Vanity Records in 1979. Ryuichi Sakamoto then produced her debut single as a solo artist and her subsequent classic self-titled LP features the propulsive backbone of CAN's Jaki Liebezeit and Holger Czukay. The next three decades took her from post-punk with members of Einstürzende Neubaten and DAF to experimental pop with Jim O'Rourke, her stoic voice remaining unmistakably Phew throughout.

Blank Forms #10: Phew

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

Lawrence Kumpf converses with Robbie Lee as they listen to a selection of Norbert Rodenkirchen's recordings and excepts from their forth-coming record. They performed with Jean-Luc Guionnet at the First Unitarian Congregational Society on May 2, 2017. 

Norbert Rodenkirchen is a famed German flutist and scholar, one of the few true modern pioneers of medieval instrumental music but not necessarily a household name in experimental music. With Robbie Lee and James Ilgenfritz, the three make up an inventive trio that injects the sensibilities of improvised deep listening and new composition into medieval music idioms. 

With Rodenkirchen on medieval flutes, Lee on matching and unusual woodwinds, and Ilgenfritz on arco double bass, their music finds common ground between improv in the American grain, Eurocentric composition, and spectralism and its discontents. Microtones and harmonics interact with the timbral complexity of electronic music while maintaining a nuance of performance unique to wooden instruments.

Blank Forms #12: Norbert Rodenkirchen, Robbie Lee, and James Ilgenfritz

In advance of Blank Forms presentation of Inclinamen for Organ on May 2, 2017, Blank Forms' director Lawrence Kumpf sat down with Alexander Lau to play a selection of Jean-Luc Guionnet's recordings including tracks from his forthcoming release on Empty Editions

Jean-Luc Guionnet' practice is subdivided into as many parts as occasions arise for him to think and act in sound and image. A Parisian artist active in several fields (music, visual arts, cinema), he has worked mostly in electro-acoustics but also has a career in free improvisation and field recording, playing alto saxophone, soprano saxophone, church organ, and electricorgans. He studied musique concrète under Iannis Xenakis and tends to extract the tiniest details from sound, appreciating slowness and the obsessive exploration of simple processes. 

Music, for him, is a way to test reality. His organ performances are about encountering the machine, the mechanism of the organ. Imagining the organ halfway between a vehicle and artificial intelligence, he thinks of it as an organic device, every element of which can be made useful: it is at once a piano, a synthesizer, a drum, a mixing board, and a primitive computer with which he can drive, navigate, compute, conduct, mix, and auscultate. He seeks to incorporate the faults of any particular organ into his work, bringing them to resound with organic affect while keeping their raw qualities. Each organ is unique. For Guionnet, the project is to find out what makes it unique.

Blank Forms #13: Jean-Luc Guionnet

Recorded in conjunction with Clocktower Radio (clocktower.org). 

Blank Forms' hosts Lawrence Kumpf and Tyler Maxin presented an hour of music emerging from the fertile ground of post-'60s greater San Francisco. Recorded ahead of Joanna Brouk's passing, it was intended to anticipate her debut performance in New York. 

Brouk's studies at Mills College and participation in the legendary KPFA shaped her practice, and both institutions served as major nexuses in a network of West coast composers and performers with novel approaches to sound. Included are excerpts of work by Brouk herself, Brouk collaborator Maggi Payne, Phil Harmonic, Frankie Mann, Barbara Golden, Charles Amirkhanian, and more.

Blank Forms #14: Subterranean Networks

Recorded in conjunction with Clocktower Radio (clocktower.org). 

This week Lawrence Kumpf is joined by alto saxophonist and sound experimentalist Matana Roberts for a conversation and overview of Roberts' work in anticipation of her weeklong public residency as part of Madison Square Park's Prismatic Park this September. They share a range of Roberts' music, both solo and collaborative, including her quartet, parts of her ambitious 12-record Coin Coin series, and odds and ends from her Soundcloud page. 

Chicago-born, NYC-based alto saxophonist Matana Roberts is an internationally renowned composer and bandleader whose work has forged new conceptual approaches to considering narrativity, history, community and political expression within improvisatory musical structures. A past member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), and the Black Rock Coalition(BRC), she prefers the term “sound experimentalist” to the historically charged “jazz musician” to refer to her multidisciplinary work, which also encompasses theater, poetry, dance, and most recently visual art. Since 2006 Roberts has developed a visionary 12-chapter project called Coin Coin, inspired by the nickname of freed slave and businesswoman Marie Thérèse Metoyer, who established a well prospering Creole community in Louisiana. Drawing from the intertwining narratives of her own genealogical research and fragments of African-American history—from the slave trade through Reconstruction and the civil rights movement to the current climate of racial turmoil—Roberts offers a nearly anthropological examination of music, storytelling, and the long, diverse trajectories of the African diaspora in America. Her compositional approach, which she calls P.S.Q.: Panoramic Sound Quilting, employs collage-based paper and digital graphic scores as a basis for new music composition, improvisation and her bricolage of work songs, lullabies, spirituals, poetry, electronics, and primal screams. She has collaborated with Roscoe Mitchell, Jayne Cortez, Merce Cunningham, Jem Cohen,Rob Mazurek, Henry Grimes, Vijay Iyer, Nicole Mitchell and Pauline Oliveros to name but a few, and has been invited to lecture and teach extensively.

Blank Forms #15: Matana Roberts, Prismatic Park

Produced in conjunction with Clocktower Radio (clocktower.org).

Blank Forms' Adrian Rew is joined by sound artist, composer, and woodwind player/extended technician Lea Bertucci. The two discuss a survey of Bertucci's recent work in anticipation of her weeklong public residency as part of Madison Square Park's Prismatic Park series.

They share music from last year's Axis/Atlas cassette, a piece composed for amplified trombone and tape, recent unreleased recordings, and an excerpt from ORACLE, a new large-scale work for 20-voice Trinity Youth Chorus in surround-sound.

Bertucci's residency runs from June 13 to June 17th, ending with a culminating with a performance of ORACLE on the 17th at 6PM.

Blank Forms #16: Lea Bertucci, Prismatic Park

Produced in conjunction with Clocktower Radio (clocktower.org).

Blank Forms' Lawrence Kumpf is joined by Ánde Somby via telephone from Tromsø, Norway for an hour of music and conversation dedicated to Somby's place within the yoik tradition. They discuss yoik history, Somby's encounters with Malcolm McLaren, and his collaboration with Chris Watson.

At its core, yoiking is a deeply spiritual performance of the individual in concert with their natural environment. The dynamic, semi-improvised vocal tradition practiced by the indigenous Sami people of Northern Norway, Sweden, and Finland has been recognized as the oldest surviving in Europe. 

Often it is an attempt to replicate or represent the sounds of animals, with the yoik of the wolf, yoik of the salmon, the mosquito yoik, etc. But just as often it is a means of storytelling. Kumpf plays music from Somby's 2016 album "Yoiking With The Winged Ones", the 1985 album Somby produced of his parents' yoiks, Inga Juuso, selections from the 1956 Folkways LP "Lappish Yoik Songs From Northern Norway", and a site-specific yoik composed by Somby for his upcoming Prismatic Park Residency—"new yoik". 

Ánde Somby's Prismatic Park residency runs from July 11th to July 16th at Madison Square Park. It is free and open to the public.

Blank Forms #17: Ánde Somby, Prismatic Park

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

Blank Forms' Lawrence Kumpf and Shelley Hirsch discuss her work, including collaborations with David Weinstein, Peter Stampfel and Butch Morris.

Shelley Hirsch's residency as part of Prismatic Park runs from August 22 to August 26, 2017 at Madison Square Park.

Blank Forms #19: Shelley Hirsch, Prismatic Park

Produced in conjunction with Clocktower Radio (clocktower.org).

Blank Forms' Lawrence Kumpf is joined by Limpe Fuchs for an hour of conversation and music ranging from Fuchs' krautrock group Anima-Sound through to more recent solo recordings and her collaboration with Evan Parker. They discuss the formation and dissolution of Anima-Sound, Fuchs' influences, and her relationship to free improvisation. 

Limpe Fuchs is a German sound artist and instrument builder whose vibrant performances develop from a real time engagement with the ecology of the space at hand. Using wood and granite stone rows, ringing bronze within pendulum string instruments and employing the percussion, viola and voice she studied at the Munich Conservatory she sensitizes the process of hearing through an exploration of music-making as a part of everyday life. An original member of ‘70s Krautrock duo Anima Sound, Limpe and then husband sculptor Paul Fuchs embodied a radical form of free living, farming and building instruments like the Fuchshorn, Fuchszither and Fuchsbass at a professional metal workshop in their Pfarrhof—a thousand-year-old former priest house—in rural Bavaria. In 1971 they hitched a handmade mobile home and stage to an old Hanomag tractor and toured Europe bringing their anarchic, uncompromising improvisations to an impromptu public at 19 kilometers per hour. A champion of egalitarian performance, Limpe quit the group in the ‘80s when new experimental theatre work demanded agreement with more members and she felt that her voice was being compromised. Ever since she has devoted herself to “making music while listening to the streaming of time…with simplicity and emotion”, following the influence of soundscape artists. Whether improvising solo or with other players, Limpe unfailingly coaxes an otherworldly atmosphere from the sounds and silence of her surroundings with a childlike wonder, always open to surprise.

Limpe Fuchs' Prismatic Park residency runs from October 3rd to October 8th at Madison Square Park. It is free and open to the public.

Blank Forms #20: Limpe Fuchs, Prismatic Park

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

Produced in conjunction with Clocktower Radio (clocktower.org).

In preparation for a forthcoming project on Henning Christiansen (1932-2008), Blank Forms' Lawrence Kumpf and Adrian Rew present an overview of the Danish composer and Fluxus artist's eccentric career. The three-hour program covers work ranging from Christiansen's pioneering contributions to Denmark's New Simplicity movement to his happenings with Joseph Beuys, organ music, impressions of Satie, and songs of ritual sacrifice.

Blank Forms #8: The Henning Christiansen Trilogy Part 2

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