Blank Forms #06 – Organic Music Societies (hardcover)

Comprehensive and previously unpublished documentation on the American composer's unproduced magnum opus.

Had it been produced, Maryanne Amacher's media opera Intelligent Life would have represented the summation of the composer's concept to date. As she wrote to John Cage in the autumn of 1983, following the untimely deaths of the opera's patrons—Wies Smals, founder of De Appel, and curator Josine van Droffelaar, in a plane crash in the Swiss Alps—she would have at last had the support to "communicate the finest of my thought to others." Amacher's serial, intended for broadcast, sought to transmit her evolving ideas about perception, listening, and composition to a broader public—shifting music away from "nod and tap recognition" toward a transformative practice that could awaken intelligence to "unrecognized and new perceptual modes."

Set in the year 2021, Intelligent Life follows the employees of Supreme Connections LLC, a music entertainment corporation navigating a future in which artificial intelligence generates music faster than composers can. Anticipating an industry-wide downturn, Supreme Connections president Aplisa Kandel seeks advanced technologies that will revolutionize the act of listening and the future of music, including a bio-music script that lets the user hear Bach from the aural perspective of a reindeer and a wearable device that goes beyond replicating the mechanical tympanic resonances of the listening subject to produce the "listening mind" or the "sophisticated perceiver"—capturing and reproducing all the emotional and psychological associations unique to each individual.
Though Amacher could not realize Intelligent Life in any of its intended forms—she theorized its publication as a serialized radio broadcast and television simulcast, among other configurations—she continued designing "treatments" for the opera for much of her career. This volume makes the most complete of these working documents—including episodic scripts, notes on the use of LaserDisc, and an illustrated storyboard for the pilot—available to the public for the first time.

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 challenges key assumptions about the capacities and limitations of that genre. Often considered to be a 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.

Though his years in the New York free-jazz scene of the sixties cemented his reputation as "one of the most forceful and convincing composers and soloists in his field," saxophonist Sonny Simmons (1933–2021) was nearly forgotten by the '80s, which found him broke, heavily dependent on drugs and alcohol, and separated from his wife and kids. "I played on the streets from 1980 to 1994, 365 days a year," Simmons tells jazz historian and biographer Marc Chaloin. "I would go to North Beach, and I'd sleep in the park. The word got around town that Sonny is a junkie, really strung out."

The resurrection of Simmons' career―upon the release of his critically acclaimed Ancient Ritual (Qwest Records) in 1994―has become a modern legend of the genre. In the last two decades of his musical career, Simmons broke through to a new echelon of recognition, joining the pantheon of great innovators and masters of the music. But to this day he remains an undersung figure. Here, in the first ever book dedicated to his life, Simmons recounts his childhood in the backwoods of Louisiana, his adolescence in the burgeoning Bay Area jazz scene and his star-studded life in New York playing alongside the greats.

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.

In 1977, Art Ensemble of Chicago Publishing Co. published Jarman's Black Case Volume I and II: Return From Exile, 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, the founder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians of which Jarman was also an original member.

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.

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.

Where most of prior entries, including Aspirations of Madness (2020), Intelligent Life (2019), and Music From The World Tomorrow (2018), have foregrounded little-seen or newly translated archival materials, this iteration privileges new texts produced specifically for the publication. These include an in-depth retrospective interview with the idiosyncratic Texan singer-songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen conducted by ICA Philadelphia chief curator Anthony Elms; a conversation between multidisciplinary writers—and longtime friends—Thulani Davis and Jessica Hagedorn on the occasion of Davis's latest poetry collection, Nothing but the Music, recently published by Blank Forms Editions; a recent discussion between composer Sarah Hennies and cellist Judith Hamann about their recent collaboration, which is included on Hamann's Music for Cello and Humming; and a conversation with composer-performers Tashi Wada and Charles Curtis, on the heels of a recent compilation of Curtis's work, Performances & Recordings 1998– 2018, produced by Wada. Each of these interviews shed light on the particularities of the artists' careers and methods in terms both formal and casual, practical and theoretical. 

In addition to these dialogues, this book features new critical reflections on three artists whose work Blank Forms has presented: the legendary jazz percussionist and healer Milford Graves, by Ciarán Finlayson; English multimedia artist Graham Lambkin and his beguiling 2011 album Amateur Doubles, by Alan Licht; and the UK-based experimental music trio Still House Plants, by Joe Bucciero. These articles mine historical, social, and theoretical contexts, filling gaps in the existing literature on the given artist-subjects. New and archival poems and writing about poetry complement these interviews and essays, including rare texts by Davis, Hagedorn, and René Daumal—the latter translated by Louise Landes Levi—and a suite of Auto-Mythological writings commissioned from Chicago-based composer and musician Angel Bat Dawid.

The tenth and final anthology from Blank Forms offers an exceptional insight into the work, working methods and thinking of the French pioneer of musique concrète and electroacoustic composition Éliane Radigue, through key texts, a wealth of archival documents (including correspondence, notes and sketches for works, concert flyers, photographs, drawings, reviews, etc.), in-depth interviews and commissioned essays.

This volume explores the early electronic work of French composer Éliane Radigue, whose radical approach to feedback, analog synthesis, and composition on tape has long evaded historical and technical interpretation. Combining key texts, newly translated primary documents, in-depth interviews, and commissioned essays, this compendium interrogates the composer's idiosyncratic compositional practice, which both embraces and confounds the iterative nature of magnetic tape, the subtleties of amplification, and the very experience of listening.

Among these entries is an in-depth overview by cellist Charles Curtis, a close collaborator of Radigue's, examining the composer's earliest experiments with feedback techniques and analog synthesis, her eventual shift to composing for unamplified instruments and live performers, and her unique aesthetic configurations of time and presence. A number of detailed conversations between the composer and researchers Georges Haessig, Patrick de Haas, Ian Nagoski, and Bernard Girard provide crucial insights into her working methods at different points throughout her career. Religious studies scholar Dagmar Schwerk reflects upon Radigue's profound 1988 synthesizer work, Kyema, in the context of Tibetan Buddhist thought and its history, while texts by musicians Daniel Silliman and Madison Greenstone examine, in notably different ways, the technical characteristics of Radigue's sound practice. Sketches for unrealized work, contemporary reviews, concert programs, and other ephemera mapping the performance history of Radigue's early work are presented together for the first time. The anthology concludes with a roundtable discussion between Curtis, Greenstone and Anthony Vine, untangling the knot of paradoxes at the center of Radigue's artistic practice to trace the thread of her continued "ethos of resistance."

Edited by Lawrence Kumpf and Charles Curtis.
Texts by Éliane Radigue, Charles Curtis, Georges Haessig, Patrick de Haas, Ian Nagoski, Bernard Girard, Dagmar Schwerk, Daniel Sillman, Madison Greenstone, Anthony Vine.

Blank Forms' journal brings together a combination of never-before published, lost, and new materials that supplement Blank Forms' 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.

Éliane Radigue (born 1932 in Paris) is considered one of the most innovative and influential contemporary composers, from her early electronic music through to her acoustic work of the last fifteen years. Influenced by musique concrète and shaped by regular sojourns in the United States, where she discovered analogue synthesisers, her work unfolds an intensity which is at once subtle and monumental. Through her deep reflections on sound and listening, not only her music but also her working methods have come to shape a widely resonating set of new parameters for working with sound as musical material.

A Congregation of Clouds assembles eight artistic voices in the form of printed matter. These publications do not speak in unison; instead, they drift, accumulate, and resist.

To congregate is to gather—sometimes in quiet reflection, sometimes in protest, sometimes in ritual. Clouds do not ask permission to form. They appear when conditions allow, under a shared sky, without needing to resolve into one.

Edited and designed by Tony Cederteg

Geoff Rickly’s debut novel Someone Who Isn’t Me is a feverish journey through the psyche of someone who no longer recognizes himself. 

When Geoff hears that a drug called ibogaine might be able to save him from his heroin addiction, he goes to a clinic in Mexico to confront the darkest and most destructive versions of himself. In this modern reimagining of the Divine Comedy, survival lurks in the darkest corners of Geoff’s brain, asking, will he make it? Can anyone?

The point of departure for the book «Black Ark» with Lee “Scratch” Perry (1936–2021), a Jamaican musical and visual artist who was based in Switzerland, is a detailed inventory of photographs and writings (Spring 2021) from the Black Ark Studios in Kingston, Jamaica, where Lee produced his music from 1973 on. He was a seminal pioneer of dub, an electronic subgenre of reggae that uses sampling, looping, remixing, reverb and echoes to create new songs as well as rework  and appropriate pre-recorded songs and tracks.

Black Ark Studios was one of the cradles of dub. It’s also where Lee “Scratch” Perry’s musical approach found an enduring visual counterpart in the form of continuously evolving mural paintings and drawings  as well as shape-shifting assemblages of records, instruments, found objects, posters, newspaper and magazine clippings, and appropriated books. The artworks form actual layers upon layers that are rhizomatically intertwined with the studio building itself  as well as with the furniture inside—and with Perry’s biography and persona.

Perry created his very own, dense and eclectic world—a world that is documented in «Black Ark», before it disappears for good: the premises have recently been sold. The photographic documentation of the studio was supplemented by efforts to secure and preserve Perry’s cultural objects as part of a joint project with various cultural institutions.

«Black Ark» which reflects the rhythm and layering effects of collage both in its content and the materials used to craft the book. Perry was involved in the conception of the book in its early stages. It also interweaves various media and chronologies. The new photographs of the Black Ark Studios will be juxtaposed with stills from old documentaries and archival photos.

The idea of a “house” serves as both a working hypothesis and a metaphor. It will be the starting point and endpoint of various thematic strands, both visual and textual: for example, the book will explore the Black Ark as a “spiritual yard” in the context of African diaspora, as well as looking into archeomusicological aspects. Furthermore, extended captions by Perry’s biographer will provide the backdrop for a kaleidoscopic panorama of Perry’s eclectic and ingenious work.

An anthology of text and graphic scores to be used while walking, from Fluxus to the critical works of current artists, through the tradition of experimental musicand performance, gathered and presented by Elena Biserna.

Walking from Scores is a hundred or so collection of non site-specific protocols, instructions and textual and graphic scores centred on walking, listening and playing sound in urban environment. It explores the relationship between art and the everyday, the dynamics of sound and listening in various environments and the (porous) frontiers between artists and audiences. It starts with two premises: an interest in walking envisaged as a relational practice and tactic enabling us to read and rewrite space; an interpretation of scores understood as open invitations and catalysers of action in the tradition of Fluxus event scores.

With scores and texts by Peter Ablinger, Milan Adamčiak, G. Douglas Barrett, Elena Biserna, Blank Noise, George Brecht, Cornelius Cardew, Stephen Chase, Giuseppe Chiari, Seth Cluett, Philip Corner, Viv Corringham, Bill Dietz, Amy Dignam, David Dunn, Haytham El-Wardany, Esther Ferrer, Simone Forti, Francesco Gagliardi, Jérôme Giller, Oliver Ginger, Anna & Lawrence Halprin, David Helbich, Dick Higgins, Christopher Hobbs, Jérôme Joy, katrinem, Debbie Kent, Bengt af Klintberg, James Klopfleisch, Milan Knížák, Alison Knowles, Takehisa Kosugi, Jirí Kovanda, Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, Bob Lens, Ligia Lewis, Alvin Lucier, Walter Marchetti, Larry Miller, iLAND/Jennifer Monson, Max Neuhaus, Alisa Oleva, Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, Open City & Emma Cocker, Nam June Paik, Michael Parsons, Ben Patterson, Cesare Pietroiusti, Mathias Poisson, Anna Raimondo, Pheobe riley Law, Jez riley French, Paul Sharits, Mieko Shiomi, Mark So, Standards, Nicolas Tardy, Davide Tidoni, Ultra-red, Isolde Venrooy, Carole Weber, Manfred Werder, Franziska Windisch, Ben Vautier, La Monte Young.

Elena Biserna is a scholar and independent curator based in Marseille, France. She is associate researcher at PRI SM (AMU / CNRS) and TEAMeD (Université Paris 8). Her interests are focused on listening and on contextual, "situated" art practices in relationship with urban dynamics, sociocultural processes, the public and political sphere. Her writings have appeared in several publications. As a curator, she has collaborated with different organisations and presented her projects internationally.

Basta Now - Women, Trans & Non-binary in Experimental Music is a non-academic essay by French poet, novelist and music enthusiast Fanny Chiarello. It’s also the first book to be published by Permanent Draft, an all-female record label and micro-press founded by Chiarello & musician Valentina Magaletti, dedicated to promoting contemporary female, non-binary and transgender artists. 

Basta Now is essentially a huge (yet admittedly not definitive) overview of 3867 womxn in the global experimental sound & music scene. It’s been written in playful and compelling prose and stylishly presented with photos, illustrations, and discographies. 

Now in its expanded edition, the book includes 80 more pages and an additional 1496 names than the first edition, extended lists and discographies, and updated chapters – especially Wild Things, All-Stars and Madame Bricolage. “This book has nothing against men, it’s just not about them” (Fanny Chiarello)