The penultimate Blank Forms anthology presents new, in-depth interviews with musicians Theo Parrish, Amelia Cuni, Akio Suzuki, and more.

At the centerpiece of Blank Forms 09: Sound Signatures is a career-spanning, twenty-hour conversation conducted over four days between producer, remixer, and Detroit house music legend Theo Parrish and veteran music journalist Mike Rubin. They go deep on Parrish's childhood in Chicago's South Side, sculptural training, and collaborations with Moodymann, Rick Wilhite, and Omar S, and explore how the social movements of 2020 have reshaped his practice and dance music at large. This volume also includes an heavily-illustrated discussion between Dhrupad singer Amelia Cuni and sound artist/tuning theorist Marcus Pal, covering Cuni's years studying voice and dance in India, her interpretations of John Cage's ragas, and collaborations with the likes of La Monte Young and Catherine Christer Hennix—accompanied by deeply researched essays from Cuni on Hindustani classical music and avant-garde performance. Finally, the collection features reminiscences from composer and performer Akio Suzuki and musician Aki Onda on Japanese Fluxus pioneer and Taj Mahal Travellers founder Takehisa Kosugi (1938–2018), with newly translated art criticism from Kosugi.

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.

Texts by Takehisa Kosugi and Amelia Cuni; interviews with Amelia Cuni by Marcus Pal, Akio Suzuki by Aki Onda, Theo Parrish by Mike Rubin.

The fourth issue of the annual publication dedicated to sound and music experimentation, co-published by Shelter Press and Ina GRM – Groupe de Recherches Musicales, around the topic of voice.

The voice is everywhere, infiltrating everything, making civilisation, marking out territories with infinite borders, spreading from the farthest reaches to the most intimate spaces. It can be neither reduced nor summarised. And accordingly, when taken as a theme, the voice is inexhaustible, even when seen in the light of its very particular relation with the sonic or the musical, as is the case in most of the texts collected in this volume. There is no point therefore in trying to circumscribe or amalgamate the multiple avatars of the voice. We must rather try to apprehend what the voice can do, to envisage its landscape, its potential effects.
 
Spectres is an annual publication dedicated to sound and music experimentation, co-published by Shelter Press and Ina GRM – Groupe de Recherches Musicales.

Edited by François J. Bonnet and Bartolomé Sanson.

Contributions by Joan La Barbara, Sarah Hennies, Peter Szendy, Youmna Saba, Lee Gamble, Ghédalia Tazartès, David Grubbs, Stine Janvin, Pierre Schaeffer, Akira Sakata, Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix, Yannick Guédon, François J. Bonnet, John Giorno.

A previously unpublished collection of 60 ink pictograms, drawn between 1976 and 1996, originally printed individually as A2 plane prints.

An early progenitor of the artist's book genre, Warja Honegger-Lavater was born in Winterthur, Switzerland in 1913. She worked as an illustrator for the magazine Jeunesse from 1944-1958, and moved to New York shortly thereafter where she began a wonderful series of artist's books. 
These books were published between 1962 and 1971, an exceptionally ripe time for artists to turn to the bookform, a time when the most often cited "first" artist's book also appeared, Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962) by Ed Ruscha.

All of Honegger-Lavater's books are made using the accordion-fold binding. Her aesthetic has been aptly described as "very clean, very Swiss." Each book tells a story, sequentially, like traditional books, but varying from them by rarely using words. Instead she chooses a symbol to represent, for example, a character, as in the red dot standing in for Red Riding Hood in Little Red Riding Hood.

A collection (montage) of biographies and themes written by Jairus Banaji.
Wanting Something Completely Different discusses a range of political figures, themes, directors and writers in a series of brief, evocative descriptions ('vignettes') aimed at laying out a vision of a modern, cosmopolitan left that can think creatively about the world we live in. The political figures include both thinkers and activists from a wide range of backgrounds—from Frantz Fanon and the Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanafani to the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. The themes range equally widely from the death of Walter Benjamin (reconstructed here from a remarkable documentary on the same theme) and the slaying of Pasolini to the work of British Marxist Perry Anderson, or the corrupt nature of India's leading corporate groups, or the outstanding contributions of Italian and U.S. Black feminists to feminist theory. And under the rubrics which discuss film and literature, there is the same striving for diversity and depth.

The vignettes collected in this Rab-Rab book first circulated on Facebook over some seven years or more and are reproduced here with a new introduction and extensive bibliographical references and notes.

Jairus Banaji is a historian and revolutionary Marxist activist. He received the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize in 2011. His academic work has ranged widely across sources and languages, with major books on Late Antiquity and commercial capitalism as well as numerous papers and articles.

The first novel by Swiss artist and writer Johana Blanc: haunted by woman figures having voluntarily ended their artistic career in the early 70', and fascinated by their radicality, a young artist asks herself how to carry on with her artistic practice without betraying her idols. Over the course of one evening, during which she attends a series of openings, the story follows her attempt to find her position among a fantasized art world, caught between a paradoxical reality and thwarted ambitions.

Johana Blanc (born 1990 in Paris), a graduate of the Head in Geneva, directs several micro-publishing projects such as the magazine Escalier and Éditions Cacahuète. Her artistic practices include installation and performance art. She also writes and has published several texts, whether collaboratively or not (Wages For Wages Against, Woman Cave).

Robida is a situated, multilingual cultural magazine published by Robida collective. Each issue explores a topic connected and generated by Topolò/Topolove, the village on the border between Italy and Slovenia where the collective is based.

The chosen topic is thrown into the world and interpreted by people who have never been to Topolò. What people send back after the open call is not only a contribution to the exploration of a defined theme but also a new interpretational tool to explore the collective’s relation to Topolò.

The ninth issue of Robida magazine digs into soil, dirt, mud, earth, ground and compost, which are interpreted through six categories, each proposed by one editor of the magazine: symbolic, feminist, theoretical, dwelling, contaminated and tactile soils.

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CONTRIBUTORS
Adriana Gallo, Alecio Ferrari, Aljaž Škrlep, Anaïs Tondeur, Angela Serino, Anna Lina Litz, antonisotzu, Antônio Frederico Lasalvia, Beatrice Zerbato, Benedetta Ciappini, Chiara Alexandra Young, Chiara Caredda, Diego García, Donatella Livigni, Dora Ciccone, Eduardo Makoszay Mayén, Eleanor White, Elena Ferrari, Elena Rucli, Emily Priest, Emmanuel Álvarez Sánchez , FAHR 021.3, Federico Bardelli, Federico Broggini, Francesca Lucchitta, Georgina Pantazopoulou, Germain Meulemans, Gijs de Boer, Giorgia Maurovich, Giulia Pompilj, Greta Biondi, Hannah Segerkrantz, How Melnyczuk, Jack Bardwell, Janja Šušnjar, jean ni, Laura Savina, Luca Scandurra, Lucia Fontanelli, Marianna Maruyama, Margherita Issori, masharu, Michael Marder, Naomi Oke, Ola Korbańska, Petra Filagrana, René Nissen, Rūta Žemčugovaitė, Silvia Marchese, Sofia Salvatori, Sasha van Aalst, Stefan Breit, Steffie de Gaetano, Stephanie Newcomb, Tina Alise Drupa, Toni Wagner, Tymon Hogenelst, Vida Rucli, Vittoria Rubini, Yiannis I. Andronikidis, Yvonne Billimore, Zuzanna Skurka.

Accompanying the 2022 exhibition at Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, Drum Listens to Heart reflects on the many ways that percussion exists beyond the framework of music and imagines "the percussive" as an aesthetic, expressive and political form more broadly. The publication includes a new essay by the curator, images of the works in the exhibition by the 25 artists and artist collectives, and short texts by 10 scholars, writers, artists and curators who respond to a single word to create a "glossary" of terms associated with percussion.

Artists include: Francis Alÿs, Luke Anguhadluq, Marcos Ávila Forero, Raven Chacon, Em'kal Eyongakpa, Theaster Gates, Milford Graves, David Hammons, Consuelo Tupper Hernández, Susan Howe & David Grubbs, NIC Kay, Barry Le Va, Rose Lowder, Lee Lozano, Guadalupe Maravilla, Harold Mendez, Rie Nakajima, the Otolith Group, Lucy Raven, Davina Semo, Michael E. Smith, Haegue Yang and David Zink Yi. Live performances by Elysia Crampton Chuquimia, Moor Mother, Nkisi, Nomon, Karen Stackpole, Marshall Trammell and William Winant.

A vibrant work of lyric, conceptual, and confessional poetic modes pitched to enact a queer politics of liberation.

Active Reception is a book of bottoming lovers, the world around us, and a history of letters, that thinks through a queer mode of writing from the bottom, a kind of coalition based politics of receptivity and expansion that is open to the world around us, its myriad life forms, its systemic oppressions, its hidden ghosts.

Noah Ross is a bookseller, editor, and poet based in Berkeley, CA. Noah is the author of Swell, and an editor of Baest: a journal of queer forms & affects, and Mo0on/IO with Lindsay Choi.

Spanning more than three decades, In Part brings together a full spectrum of the New York-based artist, writer and activist Julie Ault's (born 1957) published texts through carefully selected extracts in a single volume.

Reprinted in chronological sequence alongside a selection of full-length texts, this series of excerpts offers a timeline of Ault's continuous artistic growth, longstanding political concerns and dynamic interpersonal affinities.

Beginning in the 1980s with texts written with her collaborators in Group Material, In Part highlights Ault's shift from exhibition making in the mid-1990s to include publishing and writing. Ault's dialogic practice extends to the present day through her sustained engagements and relationships with such artists as Corita Kent, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Nancy Spero, Martin Beck, David Wojnarowicz, Liberace and Martin Wong.

Lucy R. Lippard contributes an introduction.

In writing Le Livre de Promethea Hélène Cixous set for herself the task of bridging the immeasurable distance between love and language. She describes a love between two women in its totality, experienced as both a physical presence and a sense of infinity.

The result is a stunning example of écriture feminine that won kudos when published in France in 1983. Its translation into English by Betsy Wing will extend the influence of a writer already famous for her novels and contributions to feminist theory. In her introduction Betsy Wing notes the contemporary emphasis on "fictions of presence." Cixous, in The Book of Promethea, works to "repair the separation between fiction and presence, trying to chronicle a very-present love without destroying it in the writing."

Betsy Wing is a freelance translator and fiction writer. She translated Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous's La Jeune Née (The Newly Born Woman) into English in 1986. A collection of her fiction, Look Out for Hydrophobia, was published in 1990. Hélène Cixous is also author of the play The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia, translated by Juliet Flower MacCannell, Judith Pike, and Lollie Groth (Nebraska 1994).

Hélène Cixous is also author of the play The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia, translated by Juliet Flower MacCannell, Judith Pike, and Lollie Groth (Nebraska 1994). Betsy Wing is a freelance translator and fiction writer. She translated Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous's La Jeune Née ( The Newly Born Woman) into English in 1986. A collection of her fiction, Look Out for Hydrophobia, was published in 1990.

McKenzie Wark takes readers into the undisclosed locations of New York's thriving queer rave scene, showing how raving to techno is an art and technique at which queer and trans bodies might be particularly adept, but which is for anyone who lets the beat seduce them.

Contents
1. Rave as Practice 
2. Xeno-euphoria 
3. Ketamine Femmunism 
4. Enlustment 
5. Resonant Abstraction 
6. Excessive Machine 

"How to write a book about raving as a practice that practices rave? From k-nights spent on Brooklyn's and Berlin's junkspace dance floors, McKenzie Wark abstracts a life practice of ressociation in a dance of autoconceptualization and allotheorization. In crossing toward the stranger's gift of 'letting go of ourselves as private property, ' Raving is nothing less than Wark's femmunist manifesto, her tractatus on techno's blackness, her treatise for a twenty-first-century trans ethics."—Kodwo Eshun

Lamentation practices can empower the potentiality to defy patriarchal orders ruling everyday life. Always a collective process, lamentation inscribes loss and vulnerability by tending bridges towards the world of the dead and the more-than-human. Gestures such as singing or breathing, gathering, and performances that exceed rationality can inspire a renewed approach to life and death, rural and urban. After all, amidst ongoing processes of extinction, how to mourn a queer activist, a Roma father, a burnt forest, an exiled body, and a ship sunken in the Mediterranean? How to experience loss not as something individual, but within an expanded continuum of pain? How to explore emotions beyond the private sphere? Through case studies and narrations, in different times and geographies surrounding the Aegean Sea, this book amplifies the echoes of collective tears to invigorate contemporary mourning practices that claim public space by grief, rage, and affect.

Tourism does more than transforming spaces and forcing emotions: its geographies also conceal a persisting power that captures the imagination. In their operational sturdiness, tourismscapes appear intractable and inert, making their alternative renderings almost unthinkable. It feels uncanny to picture islands and their coasts freed from programs of leisure. But in recent years, the exhaustion of people and landscapes has brought forth a renewed imperative to think outside this ubiquitous extractive industry. Through essays, pieces of fiction, and visual references, this book discusses both the difficulty and the necessity of disrupting the monocultural imaginations of tourism. To escape the devouring vortex of its sticky nature and messianic promises, the cultural and political work necessary is not only this of negation and resistance, but also that of bold re-conceptualizations and re-imaginings.

In the Mirror of Care Work was initiated by Inga Gerner Nielsen and Ar Utke Acs, two Danish artists whose work spans immersive performance, dance, choreography, curation and sociology. At two events in 2021 and 2022 that hosted dialogues between nurses and interactive performers, Nielsen and Acs began collecting stories and responses to conversational exercises, the latter of which revolved around questions such as – What can performance artists learn from nurses? How does the interactive performer's engagement with the audience correlate with the nurse's work with a patient? What skills, techniques, and strategies might these two fields share?

The exchange of knowledge from these two gatherings formed the basis of an ongoing dialogic project, as well as the content of this publication, which has been supplemented with seven essays by nurses, educators, performance theorists and performers. The book includes a series of drawings commissioned from artist Marit Benthe Norheim, graphics by TABLOID Press co-director Nat Marcus, and photographs of a performance installation staged by Nielsen and Acs in the Department of Nursing Education at University College of Northern Denmark – Hjørring.

Edited by Inga Gerner Nielsen and Ar Utke Acs, editorial assistance from Nat Marcus.

With essays by Elvira Crois, Majula Drammeh, Vienne Chan, Helle Kronborg Krogsgaard, Tyra Wigg, Rikke Steen Mapstone and Ar Utke Acs.

Basic Mechanics is a hold-loose collection of words as findlings and carriers, that hold or lose meaning. Consequently, a description of this work will never simply come out of one’s mouth. The narrative will seem tied together with loose threads. As Ursula K. Le Guin writes in The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, we know the story of the hero with the spear and the violence and the teleological progression. But isn’t the story that can be told by all, one of carrying and being carried? Isn’t language a wrapping for all those contradictory and wondrous thoughts and feelings? And can they be captured on paper, for a while, and set free again to counterbalance the killer story?

Confessing secrets and desires to each other became a method of sharing. Accompanied by giggles, we somatically connected the stories we carry, which we (dare to) place with another, which move from the inside out. This publication spills, soaks, opens and closes to confessions, poems and drawings in looping motifs. A shell swimming in a sea of words.

Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative publishes unexpected, genre-bending works by important 20th century writers. Unearthed from personal and institutional archives in the United States and abroad, these materials are edited by doctoral students at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

LOST & FOUND SERIES VI presents work by Gregory Corso, Judy Grahn, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, and Ted Joans. While the styles and experiences of these writers are radically different, each project presented here enacts a commitment to the exploration of knowledge unbound by disciplinary constraints.

Gregory Corso: Naropa Lectures 1981, introduced by Anne Waldman, includes two transcribed and annotated lectures that illustrate Corso's vast storehouse of cultural knowledge, animating his poetics both on the page and in the classroom.

Bobbie Louise Hawkins: The Sounding Word presents two very different lectures from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and a new interview with the author. Whether looking at iconic French novelist Colette or examining the poetics of prose, The Sounding Word describes an unflinching empirical approach to knowledge and its transmission through direct experience.

Judy Grahn: Selections from Blood, Bread, and Roses explores mythic, societal, and personal relationships to menstruation throughout time, and is accompanied by a recent interview with the legendary poet, teacher, scholar, and activist.

Ted Joans: Poet Painter / Former Villager Now / World Traveller, introduced by Diane di Prima, presents an array of previously unpublished texts on jazz, surrealism, travel guides to Africa and Paris, his inimitable Negative Cowboy, and photographs from his life and times. As writers, each considers and refigures the malleable conditions of historical truth and the pursuit of knowledge as part of their creative process. And as readers, we are encouraged to do the same.

SERIES VI includes:

Gregory Corso: Naropa Lectures 1981 (Part I & II) (ed. William Camponovo, Mary Catherine Kinniburgh, Öykü Tekten)

Bobbie Louise Hawkins: The Sounding Word (ed. Iris Cushing)

Judy Grahn: Selections from Blood, Bread, and Roses (ed. Iemanjá Brown & Iris Cushing)

Ted Joans: Poet Painter / Former Villager Now / World Traveller (Part I & II) (ed. Wendy Tronrud & Ammiel Alcalay)

A selection of poems by the Moroccan Marxist, feminist and poet Saida Menebhi, who died in prison on hunger strike in 1977, aged 25, after being imprisoned for her political organising against the Moroccan state. Translated from French to English for the first time, the zine contains a selection of the poems Saida wrote during her time in prison, shortly before her death. It also includes an essay on the Years of Lead in Morocco - specifically the 70s - as well as the conditions of prison, hunger strikes, poetry, and martyrdom (from an internationalist position: including Bobby Sands and the republican hunger strikes).

The Posthumanist is a bi-annual English and German magazine featuring art, design, technology and writing. Each issue presents one theme from various more-than-human perspectives, inviting readers to imagine what living together on planet earth is and could be.

The anthology Solidarity Must Be Defended brings together projects on gestures and alignments within the visual arts around transnational solidarity during the Cold War. In dialogue with, among others, the quietist tendencies of non-alignment and the radical vector of liberation movements, the book looks at both grand initiatives and tragic misfires from an entangled, decolonizing world. The point of departure for this anthology is a special issue of Mezosfera magazine (“Refractions of Socialist Solidarity”) edited in Budapest by Szakács in dialogue with Mohaiemen’s three-channel film Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017).  This anthology proposes that transnational solidarity is always worth celebrating, but also extremely difficult to inhabit.

For so it happens that when the poets speak, objects appear closer to their own shadows. The poet's mouth fills up with horses and marble, and his verses start to shine like rivers. These rivers then turn back to flow through the very palace he is depicting. The poet's own words begin to weigh down on him, as though he were holding up a palace with his palms. Then he travels, and the palace is obliterated. Countries and nations change, and naught remains but what the poets had seen. Of what the poets had seen, naught remains but its image in anthologies. And when the libraries have been flooded or burned to the ground, nothing but the commentaries on those anthologies are left, and all that one finds in these commentaries is that which was appropriated and wrought a thousand times over. 

Hussein Nassereddine is a multidisciplinary artist. His work in installation, writing, video and performance originates from a practice around language that builds fragile monuments - some verbal, some sonic, some tactile - rooted in collective histories and resources of poetry, ruins, construction and image-making.

Translated from Arabic by Ben Koerber.

M was exasperated by her friend's frivolous attitude toward the tragedy of losing a role. She was not trained to read the potential in R's wild imagination. Was it a commitment to realism, trained by the ideological morality of activism, that made her unresposive to the fantasy genre and vigilante characters? R's instinct was to court the unfamiliar, whereas M's training was to engage with criticality. Both these attributes could have interfaced in interesting and colourful ways, with sparks and currents, if and only if the social conditions of the time had been conducive to the arrival of a vigilante.

Madhusree Dutta is a filmmaker, curator and author based in Mumbai and Berlin. She has been the executive director of Majlis Culture, a centre for rights discourse and art initiatives in Mumbai, 1998-2016; and artistic director of Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne, 2018-2021. Her areas of interest are documentary practices, urban cultures, migration movements, transient identities, and lived-in hybridity.

This publication proposes a set of aural exercises that show readers how to disappear, reappear, join a group, or leave a group. Its annex is a lexicon of some of the sounds that dwell in or are banished from the middle-class household. 

Text: Haytham El-Wardany
Editors: Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis
Translated from Arabic by Jennifer Peterson (Preliminary Exercises) and Robin Moger (Sounds of the Middle Classes)