Poësy Matters and Other Matters (2 vol.)

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.

Comprehensive and previously unpublished documentation on the American composer's unproduced magnum opus.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

The current crisis of museums and the future of Institutional Critique.

Faced with waning state support, declining revenue, and forced entrepreneurialism, museums have become a threatened public space. Simultaneously, they have assumed the role of institutional arbiter in issues of social justice and accountability. The canon of Institutional Critique has responded to the social embeddedness of art institutions by looking at the inner workings of such organizations. In After Institutions, Karen Archey expands the definition of Institutional Critique to develop a broader understanding of contemporary art's sociopolitical entanglements, looking beyond what cultural institutions were to what they are and what they might become.

Karen Archey is curator of contemporary art at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. She is a 2015 Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant recipient for short-form writing. Since joining the Stedelijk Museum in April 2017, Archey has organized solo exhibitions by artists Rineke Dijkstra, Stefan Tcherepnin, Catherine Christer Hennix, Steffani Jemison, Metahaven, Jeff Preiss, Charlie Prodger, and Hito Steyerl. She has written numerous catalogue essays and is a contributor to several art publications, including Artforum and Frieze.

Mark Fisher taught a generation to hear the future's disappearance in contemporary music, as if the rhythm of the world was synchronised to the periodic flowering of new creative forms. His diagnosis was devastating: stagnation in music was akin to a venous insufficiency, or worse, some kind of nuclear winter that would ward off the spring for endless generations to come. 

Drawing on musicians like SOPHIE, Arca and Iglooghost, Matt Bluemink declares that the future is not lost; it still speaks to us through music. If Fisher’s Hauntology — dwelling on ghosts of the past — is the logic of depression, then Bluemink’s Anti-Hauntology posits a logic of hope where voices from the future continue to guide the development of the present. 

Island-hopping through Stiegler's philosophy of technics, Simondon's theory of individuation, and the spatial imaginaries of cyberpunk and solarpunk, Bluemink builds a theoretical framework equal to the times — one that takes seriously our capacity to, not only diagnose the world, but remake it. In order to create a new future we must re-imagine our relationship with music, with technology, and with culture. The world of tomorrow is a blank canvas; an open book. New beginnings are always possible. 

Matt Bluemink is the founder and editor-in-chief of Blue Labyrinths online magazine. His research is focused on the relationship between the philosophy of technology, media theory and urbanism. He also writes on contemporary music, literature, and digital culture. 

"Joseph Matick is a former poet, now bird. He flies over pastures and eats chemtrails as his karmic sentence for spending so many years without flying. (You still have time, kids). Remarkably, he wrote this book in Paris with Jack before his transformation into Frank 0' Hara for the front cover. This book is dedicated to his father and his son. And to all the gum chewing geniuses of the lower canal. He wrote this in the 9éme and was inspired by baseball, flowers, and getting money so as not to die. These are his simplest and most penetrating words."

KATE FOR AVEC JACK VERA INTL

Joseph Matick is an American poet and filmmaker based in Paris. He grew up on a farm in small-town America, moved to Chicago, and eventually to Paris, where he stayed. He studied at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University — of which he has said: “that place ripped the rug from under my feet” — and has been writing ever since. He is the author of four books: three published by Far West Press — The Baba Books (New American Babble, Post Meridiem Seasick Fuzz, Animal My Soul), Cherry Wagon, and Good Looking Pomes (March 31, 2026). His work appears in King Kong Magazine and is held in the collection of the American Library in Paris.

Translated to English for the first time. 

This book project introduces the history of eunuchism through auto-theory, historiography, historical fiction and poetry, exploring this identity in the ancient world and what kind of echoes can be heard in the present day. By overlapping various histories, and drawing the line between eunuchs in antiquity and contemporary gender discourse, Odete makes a case for a history of gender that hasn’t yet been written, asking what is the relevance of eunuchs to the history of art? And what does the study of the eunuch expose about the current world? 

Edited by Jan-Pieter ‘t Hart
Proofread by Callum Dean
Designed by Tjobo Kho & Vlad Omelianenko

as the non-world falls away is set of fragmented poetic compositions, created through iPhone scans of the artists notebook that have then been worked over digitally, testing the boundaries between image and text in a palimpsestic manner

WITHOUT THE E is a series of pamphlets responding to a presence or an absence felt in contemporary digital culture.

Deep Listening is a practice created by composer Pauline Oliveros in order to enhance her own as well as other's listening skills. She teaches this practice worldwide in workshops, retreats and in her ground breaking Deep Listening classes at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Mills College. Deep Listening practice is accessible to anyone with an interest in listening. Undergraduates with no musical training benefit from the practices and successfully engage in creative sound projects. Many report life changing effects from participating in the Deep Listening classes and retreats.