Blank Forms Editions HHV Records 19 Items

The Shadow Ring (1992-2002) presents a comprehensive overview of the work produced by British musiciansGraham Lambkin, Darren Harris, and later Tim Goss over the course of a decade. Throughout theirlegendary ten-year run, this shambolic rock outfit, formed by a group of teenagers in the port townFolkestone, were an enigmatic force on the international musical sub-underground. The group have leftbehind a mighty run of eight LPs, a handful of 7-inches, and a spate of raucous live shows and cryptic zineappearances on both sides of the Atlantic. Collected here for the first time are The Shadow Ring's live cuts,rarities, and complete commercial releases, spread out across eleven CDs and a DVD, accompanied by annearly five-hundred-page book that includes a monographic biographical survey, more than one hundredcolor photos, a comprehensive discography with transcribed lyrics, and a selection of zine appearances, fliers,postcards, and other miscellanea. In aggregate, this significant collection not only plums the depths of theband and its attendant lore, but reveals a vivid minor history of mail-order networks, bedroom recordingsessions, cross-USA couch-surfing, and encounters with fellow travelers such The Dead C, Harry Pussy,Charalambides, Richard Youngs and the No-Neck Blues Band. Where is the connecting thread between RalfWehowsky and Squirrel Nut Zippers? Inquire within.The roughly 200 songs in this set trace the band from its earliest days recording in Lambkin's parents' house(SHP Studios), through its brooding mid-period, garnering word-of-mouth notoriety that peaked with the trioturning down an invitation to tour with Pavement, to a string of increasingly uncompromising experimentswith electronics, voice, and tape. Although the band's sound morphs considerably during this time period,from spartan beginnings using pots and pans as a drum set to their ultra-deconstructed latter-day approach,certain core sensibilities are apparent throughout: brash youthful rawness, wry and m...

The fourth release in Blank Forms Editions's initiative to chart the ever-expanding musical practice of Catherine Christer Hennix, Solo for Tamburium captures the composer's most recent major work. Hennix plays an instrument of her own creation, a keyboard interface controlling a suite of eighty-eight recordings of precision-tuned tambura, creating a sweeping and continuous flow of rich harmonic interplay. This piece, documented in Berlin at MaerzMusik 2017, carefully draws upon the fundamental perceptual effects of sound, forming an exacting and cathartic electronic drone. Densely-layered timbral textures and continuous overtone collisions create a maze-like sonic landscape, thrusting the listener into what Hennix calls divine equilibrium or a distinctionless state of being. Since the late 1960s, Hennix has created a massive and innovative body of work spanning minimal music, computer programming, poetry, sculpture, and light art - pushing the technical and conceptual boundaries of these media toward singular ends. She was part of the downtown music school in New York and has worked extensively with some of its key figures, including Henry Flynt and La Monte Young. In the '70s, Hennix studied the nature and use of harmonic sound as a disciple of Pandit Pran Nath, a master of the Kirana tradition of classical Hindustani music. The exceptionally designed tamburas of Pran Nath were central to her intensive investigations, as was the devotional practice of carefully tuning and sounding the instruments in a continuous and even flow_both have guided her work with sound ever since. In 1976, at Stockholm's Moderna Museet, Hennix presented a pair of groundbreaking works that came to define her ensuing practice. With the Deontic Miracle_a group composed of Hennix, her brother Peter, and the Swedish percussionist Hans Isgren_she performed a series of modal compositions for Renaissance oboes, sheng, and harmonic feedback distortion. On this same occasion she premiered an equally significant body of solo work for keyboard...

In the spring of 1999, Charles Curtis, Alan Licht, and Dean Roberts brought an unconventional mix of drone, improvisation, and experimental rock on an eleven-stop tour of Europe. The concept was straightforward, yet novel: each night, they would improvise a single piece while sustained sine waves played for the duration of the concert. May 99, culled from three shorter pieces recorded for a radio program at Amsterdam's VPRO near the end of the tour, represents an early high watermark in the collision of minimal and rock sensibilities that started to become prevalent in the late 90s and is an ear-opening listen even for those familiar with the musicians' other projects.May 99 combines resonant sine waves in the style of eminent downtown New York composer La Monte Young's Theater of Eternal Music with scratchings, scrapings, and warblings produced by Licht and Roberts's guitars, Curtis's cello, and a variety of electronics. Just as sine waves hold together these sundry improvisations, a shared tendency toward the minimalistic-Licht's performances with the Blue Humans, collaborations with Loren Connors, and solo guitar records; Roberts in the band Thela and his solo project White Winged Moth; and Curtis performing with Young and his own Trio-brought together three musicians with very different backgrounds, creating fertile ground on which they generated the album's unclassifiable sounds.

Available from Blank Forms for the first time since its original 1980 release on ALM-Uranoia, NewSense of Hearing documents a collaboration between Takehisa Kosugi and Akio Suzuki, twoluminaries of Japanese experimental music in the lineage of Fluxus. Blank Forms's high-qualityreissue of the sought-after, long out of print LP, is produced by musician-artist Aki Onda andmastered from the original tapes recorded on April 2, 1979, at Tokyo's Aeolian Hall.Described by Suzuki as the "culmination" of their sound,New Sense of Hearing features the twomusicians improvising together in that empty Tokyo theater, Kosugi on vocals, violin, and radiotransmitter and Suzuki on the Analapos, his namesake glass harmonica, spring cong, andkikkokikiriki, all apparatuses of his own invention.Suzuki and Kosugi first met at the city's Minami Gallery in 1976 on the occasion of "Sound Objectsand Sound Tools," an exhibition of Suzuki's homemade instruments. Two years later, at the Festivald'Automne in Paris, Suzuki invited Kosugi to join him for a suite of performances as part of theexhibition "MA: Espace - Temps au Japon," organized by architect Arata Isozaki andcomposer-writer Toru Takemitsu. Suzuki and Kosugi performed together at the Musée des ArtsDécoratifs, Paris, nearly fifty times, honing their approach to mutual improvisation, before travelingwith the exhibition to Stockholm and New York_critic Tom Johnson wrote in the Village Voice thathe had "seldom seen two performers so completely tuned in on the same types of sounds, the sameperformance attitude, the same philosophy, the same sense of what music ought to be."For NewSense of Hearing, the duo reunited in Japan and produced an extraordinary dispatch from theircollaboration of arioso violin, echoing vocals and bangs, and metallic twangs. As Johnson observedin 1979, Kosugi and Suzuki are "in a very subtle artistic world where there can be no directrelationships. . . . Only coincidence."Takehisa Kosugi (1938-2018) was a composer, ar...

The final album released by the composer-performer Jerry Hunt before his death, Ground: Five Mechanic Convention Streams is a rare and foundational audio document of Hunt's compositional process. The record collects five pieces from the artist's 'Ground' series, translating his characteristically variable and spatial scores into "recorded fixtures of activity using mechanic musical instrument arrays," to eerie and mesmerizing results. Originally released by experimental label OODiscs in 1992, it is now available on vinyl for the first time from Blank Forms Editions. Its tracks are dense and unpredictable, a miscellany of arrhythmic bursts, fragments of spoken and whispered words, soft then fevered rattles and shaking, and a rare return to pianoforte for the virtuoso player. The unstable quality of these tracks belies the rigor of Hunt's procedures; each of Ground's five pieces, their "common ground core," is derived from the angelic tables of sixteenth century English philosopher and occultist John Dee, adapted by Hunt as frameworks to layer, adapt, and renew in his compositions. With a complex arrangement of sensors and equipment, which the artist called "interrelated electronic, mechanic, and social sound-sight interactive transactional systems," Hunt realized these derivative systems in the techno-shamanic performances for which he is best known. Ground distills these procedures into fixed songs, producing a vital and critical record of Hunt's singular approach to composition.

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, well 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."

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...

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!"

In 1968, Don Cherry had already established himself as one of the leading voices of the avant-garde. Having pioneered free jazz as a member of Ornette Coleman’s classic quartet, and with a high profile collaboration with John Coltrane under his belt, the globetrotting jazz trumpeter settled in Sweden with his partner Moki and her daughter Neneh. There, he assembled a group of Swedish musicians and led a series of weekly workshops at the ABF, or Workers’ Educational Association, from February to April of 1968, with lessons on extended forms of improvisation including breathing, drones, Turkish rhythms, overtones, silence, natural voices, and Indian scales. That summer, saxophonist and recording engineer Göran Freese—who later recorded Don’s classic Organic Music Society and Eternal Now LPs—invited Don, members of his two working bands, and a Turkish drummer to his summer house in Kummelnäs, just outside of Stockholm, for a series of rehearsals and jam sessions that put the prior months’ workshops into practice. Long relegated to the status of a mysterious footnote in Don’s sessionography, tapes from this session, as well as one professionally mixed tape intended for release, were recently found in the vaults of the Swedish Jazz Archive, and the lost Summer House Sessions are finally available over fifty years after they were recorded.

On July 20, the musicians gathered at Freese’s summer house included Bernt Rosengren (tenor saxophone, flutes, clarinet), Tommy Koverhult (tenor saxophone, flutes), Leif Wennerström (drums), and Torbjörn Hultcrantz (bass) from Don’s Swedish group; Jacques Thollot (drums) and Kent Carter (bass) from his newly formed international band New York Total Music Company; Bülent Ates (hand drum, drums), who was visiting from Turkey; and Don (pocket trumpet, flutes, percussion) himself. Lacking a common language, the players used music as their common means of communication. In this way, these frenetic and freewheeling sessions anticipate Don’s turn to more explicitly pan-ethnic expression, preceding his epochal Eternal Rhythm dates by four months. The octet, comprising musicians from America, France, Sweden, and Turkey, was a perfect vehicle for Don’s budding pursuit of “collage music,” a concept inspired in part by the shortwave radio on which Don listened to sounds from around the world. Using the collage metaphor, Don eliminated solos and the introduction of tunes, transforming a wealth of melodies, sounds, and rhythms into poetic suites of different moods and changing forms. The Summer House Sessions ensemble joyously layers manifold cultural idioms, traversing the airy peaks and serene valleys of Cherry’s earthly vision.

In the Swedish Jazz Archive quite a few other recordings from the same day were to be found. Some of the highlights are heard as bonus material on the CD edition of this album. The octet is augmented by producer and saxophone player Gunnar Lindqvist, who led the Swedish free jazz orchestra G.L. Unit on the album Orangutang, and drummer Sune Spångberg, who recorded with Albert Ayler in 1962. The bonus CD also includes a track without Cherry featuring Jacques Thollot joined by five Swedes including Lindqvist, Tommy Koverhult, Sune Spångberg, and others.

With liner notes by Magnus Nygren and album art featuring a cover painting by Moki Cherry: Untitled, ca. 1967–68.

Organized in conjunction with Organic Music Societies, a Blank Forms project that also includes a book, art exhibition, and performance series.

close to NM. jewel case in slipcase

DINGGGDONGGGDINGGGzzzzzzz!!!!!!! In the newest record by the iconoclasticBrooklyn-born composer Charlemagne Palestine (b. 1947), find two mesmerizing works for carillon,the keyboard-controlled bell tower derived in the 16th century. On side A, a new piece recorded atthe artist's studio in Belgium_a high-ceiling, stuffed-animal-packed paradise he callsCharleworld_among friends and "divinities," his name for the thousands of plush toys he's amassedsince the '60s. On the flip side, Blank Forms Editions' very first and long out-of-print releaseappears on vinyl for the first time: a cathartic street recording of the minimalist composer's 2018musical eulogy for his late friend Tony Conrad, performed on the bells of St. Thomas EpiscopalChurch where the two first met. Two mesmerizing "klanggdedangggebannggg" sessions in theQuasimodo of 53rd Street's unmistakable improvisatory style.Perhaps more than any of his contemporaries in the bustling, cross-disciplinary downtownNew York arts scene of the '60s and '70s, Charlemagne Palestine has embodied the notion of theartist as playful polymath, testing and transcending nearly every creative form imaginable in his morethan six-decade career. Originally trained in Jewish sacred singing to be a cantor, he began his artisticlife as a musician, studying piano and accordion, accompanying figures like Tiny Tim and AllenGinsburg on percussion, using early synthesizers as an assistant to Alwin Nikolais, and eventuallylanding a long-running gig as the carillonneur at Midtown's St. Thomas Episocal. This libertine spiritof experimentation soon led to adventures in other aesthetic arenas: making kinetic light sculptureswith Len Lye, devising choreographed performances with Simone Forti, and producing over a dozenvisceral videotapes with the Castelli Gallery. In the '70s, he was particularly prominent on theburgeoning loft movement, becoming well-known for his sparse, intense, and exacting long-formpiano concerts, that seemed to bend the very natu...

Throughout their legendary, decade-long run, the Shadow Ring were an enigmatic force on theinternational musical sub-underground. Before their disbandment in 2002, this shambolic rockoutfit, formed by a group of rowdy teenagers in southeast England, left behind a mighty run of eightLPs, a handful of 7"s, and a spate of raucous live shows and cryptic zine appearances on both sidesof the Atlantic, all which have bolstered their enduring word-of-mouth mystique. Beginning this yearwith the first-ever vinyl pressing of the self-released pre-Shadow Ring tape The Cat & Bells Club(1992), Blank Forms Editions is conducting a systematic retrospective of the storied group, includinga multi-year LP reissue effort and a forthcoming comprehensive CD box set and an over fivehundred page book.Recorded in summer of 1994 at S.H.P studios (frontman Graham Lambkin's parents' home), thegroup's sophomore record Put the Music In Its Coffin is a more sinister, saturnine affair than theirdebut City Lights. Coffin was many listeners' introduction to the Shadow Ring, who had hithertoself-released their music, courting a steady stable of international fans through the magazine andmail-order catalog Forced Exposure. For their follow-up, the duo reached out to the ascendingPhiladelphia label Siltbreeze, whose eclectic roster of sneering, low-fidelity rock and noise connecteddisparate subterranean scenes from rust-belt America to the English Midlands, Dunedin, andbeyond. As luck would have it, Siltbreeze proprietor Tom Lax was already a fan of the band's firstrecord and arranged to release both a 7" and their "difficult second album." The connection provedto run deeper than vinyl_within six months, Lax would pick up the pair from the airport for theirspring 1995 US tour. This episode marked not only their first trip to the States but their first liveperformances at all, formally introducing the Shadow Ring to the American underground andsolidifying the allure of the Folkestone pair.From the get-go...

Neo Gibson records, performs, and occasionally produces under the alias 7038634357. Their music is characterized by its formal precision, melodic structure, and an idiosyncratic emotional tenor built around loosely narrative compositional forms. Up until this point, it has been primarily self-released on small-batch CDrs and performed in intimate settings. Recorded entirely on their computer using digital synthesis and audio processing, Neo Seven is their first vinyl record, and could be considered their seventh album depending on where you begin amidst their prolific and fluid output.Within a runtime of just over thirty minutes, Neo Seven contains a spare, beautiful, and raw journey through and around the artist's emotive, psychologically-charged ambient songwriting. The album's seven tracks bleed into and out of one another, continually forming and deforming between ambient soundscape, song, and silence. As each track builds upon its own interior logic, complex forms emerge out of simple structures, and layers of oscillations commingle and create space for each other. Pulsation is a major motif throughout the record, as Neo's heavily-processed harmonic melodies, gated regularly by silence, create an expansive field in which an interior, subjective journey takes place.

Recorded in Lary 7's legendary apartment studio Plastikville over nearly a decade, Larynx is the firstfull-length retrospective of the East Village icon's hybrid music and engineering practice. The recordmobilizes 7's array of homemade instruments, which he `frankensteins' together from offcast andoutmoded bits of technology. An ode to the long-lost Canal Street junk shops he frequented in the1970s and '80s, Larynx brings together numerous thrift finds and sonic inventions used in histheatrical performances and installations.To play "le concretotron," a board covered with twenty years worth of unspooled magnetic tape, 7runs a tape head topographically over the flattened strips, picking up snippets of their recordedcontents. The spring tree, another of his contraptions, is simply turned on and left to its owndevices; feedback loops cause the amplified coils to resound in space and slowly increase in volume.The track "Mechano-Bleep" features a pattern generator constructed from a telephone sequenceswitch, 150 oscillators from an electric accordion, a sewing machine motor, and an early computingsystem called a "select-a-board." Meanwhile, antiquated electronic instruments abound_7 employsthe Ondioline, a precursor to the synthesizer; a Philicorda organ; and a homemade Trautonium,among other gadgets.Following Delia Derbyshire of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Raymond Scott of ManhattanResearch, 7 adopts a painstaking editing process that is entirely analogue. With lacquer cut directlyfrom reel-to-reel and mastered by Paul Gold, Larynx is, in 7's words, "the sound of the twentiethcentury going haywire."Multimedia art alchemist LARY 7 was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1956, and encouraged by hismother to mine junkyards for treasure from a young age. A former media studies student of TonyConrad, Paul Sharits, and Hollis Frampton at the city's public university, 7 was also educated inengineering, architecture, and filmmaking. He moved to Manhattan permanently in the late 1...

"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."_Pascal-Graham Lambkin (of Shadow Ring fame) returns with a long awaited epic double LP, Aphorisms, hisfirst major solo outing since Community (Kye, 2016). Recorded mostly during the early winter months of 2022,in post-pandemic New York and post-Brexit London, Aphorisms assembles the sonic detritus of daily life intohauntingly intimate aural soundscapes. Made between Lambkin's residence in East London and Blank Formsin New York, Aphorisms superimposes the two spaces onto one another creating an imaginary stage where hismusical dramas unfold. A transatlantic mediation on the rooms where Lambkin has lived and worked,Aphorisms summons up hallucinatory vistas by way of the composer's collage technique, layering fieldrecordings, piano, guitar, percussion, vocal fragments, and repurposed elements on top of one another indouble, triple, and quadruple exposures. Like the Shadow Ring's Lindus (Swill Radio, 2001)_recordedbetween Folkestone and Miami_Aphorisms ruminates on estrangement and displacement, catching Lambkinas he returns to London after two decades of living in the States, in his words, "leaving home to returnhome."Aphorisms continues Lambkin's synthetic-naturalist approach to sound-making, twisting disparate andunique elements together to create the sensation of a coherent sonic space. At the heart of his practice is theillusion of form, whereby Lambkin combines sonic elements, documenting the moment that they coalesce intomusic only to disintegrate back into incidental sound. The album is centered around two pianos, one in New Yorkand one in London, sounding together as if through the ether, creating a spectral atmosphere that Lambkin fillswith melodic snippets, fragments of songs, spoken-word musings, and guttural barks or "the animal purity ofvoice," as he has it. The superimposition of the two spaces is maximized in the album's closing titular track,where, much like on earlier w...

In 1992, under the guise of the Cat & Bells Club, eighteen-year-old Cheriton residents Graham Lambkin and Darren Harris self-released three tapes. two yellow cassettes and one pink. documenting their earliest musical efforts at S.H.P. studios (Lambkin's bedroom in his parents' house). The lowest of all lo-fi recordings, these tracks were laid down live, directly into a boombox with no overdubs. Relieved of their academic expectations and plunged into the workforce, the duo aspired to enter the annals of rock history, making their own primitive teenage overtures to Marc Bolan, the Incredible String Band, Whitehouse, and the Godz. Lyrically and spiritually the Cat & Bells Club had much to do with Bolan's early Tyrannosaurus Rex project, but with a hyperlocalized Folkestonian twist that nonetheless maintained his penchant for chevaline. While much of the Club's repertoire comprised freeform instrumental try-outs. untuned charity shop guitars and coffee cup drum kits. a number of songs featured Lambkin's original lyrics, read by both members of the band, dramatizing the comings and goings of anthropomorphic animals and musing abstractly on the minutiae of daily life in Cheriton (their native C-Town). Taking their moniker from a mishearing of the jester's bauble, cap and bells' a line from Incredible String Band's "The Iron Stone", the duo operated for a brief year under the increasingly esoteric influence of the Fisheye mail-order and then fledgling Forced Exposure fanzine, and from the airwaves via Radio 1's John Peel show. This collection was compiled by Lambkin in the early aughts for an unrealized release on his now defunct Kye label, but barring a few tracks on a retrospective 7" issued by Siltbreeze in 2010, hardly any of these recordings have been heard beyond a handful of hangers-on, inner-circle drinking allies, and the most devoted of fans. The Cat & Bells Club set the stage for what was to soon follow, when the group changed its name to the Shadow Ring. the rest is history.