In stock
LP
THE SHADOW RING
“Wax-Work Echoes”
Originally conceived as a compilation of outtakes and live recordings from The Shadow Ring’s 1995 stateside tour, Wax-Work Echoes takes its name from the first line of “Put the Music in Its Coffin,” the title track of the group’s breakthrough release. Lambkin abandons the bits-and-bobs approach, advancing the Shadow Ring concept with entirely original material that builds on the unit’s self-mythologizing lyrics, celebrates the clicking of horse hooves, ponders on the sociability of rats and mice, and warns of the dangers of poultry. The first Shadow Ring album to officially include Tim Goss in the main lineup, Wax-Work Echoes reveals the group in its final and lasting form, awash in the outer bounds of atmospheric exploration, with Lambkin’s familiar wry and morbid lyricism and the stripped-down angularity of amateurishly detuned guitars fully intact. While Klaus Canterbury and Tony Clark seem all but forgotten, and the shrugged off S. Fritz is listed on the liner notes as performing only “when required,” Lambkin did solicit contributions from outside the inner circle. A bit of “Mambo Twist,” lifted from a tape of unreleased Vitamin B12 material sent to Lambkin by Alasdair Willis, found its way into “V.E.R.M.I.N.,” while an extended epistle contribution from Richard Youngs (and, technically, Brian Lavelle) would be employed in the second half of “Catching Sight/Of Passing Things.”
Released on CD in 1996 for Bruce Russell’s newly minted Corpus Hermeticum, Wax-Work Echoes was recorded concurrently with intense rehearsal periods, in anticipation of the forthcoming “Rose Watson Tour,” and was supported by a celebratory fanzine media blitz. The album seemingly absorbs the frenetic excess of the band’s transatlantic travels; Wax-Work Echoes channels the trio’s wilder instincts into an unresolved catharsis, not yet free of frustration or restlessness. Out of print for almost three decades and available here for the first time ever on long-playing disc, Wax-Work Echoes is a classic from the outer eddies of The Shadow Ring’s sound, a must-have for any aficionado’s collection: “A window slides, glass slips from frame / And canvas carcass breathes again.”
Throughout their legendary, decade-long run, The Shadow Ring were an enigmatic force on the international musical sub-underground. Before their disbandment in 2002, this shambolic rock outfit, formed by a group of rowdy teenagers in southeast England, left behind a mighty run of eight LPs, a handful of 7"s, and a spate of raucous live shows and cryptic zine appearances on both sides of the Atlantic, all which have bolstered their enduring word-of-mouth mystique. Beginning in 2023 with the first-ever vinyl pressing of the self-released pre–Shadow Ring tape The Cat & Bells Club (1992), Blank Forms Editions has been conducting a systematic retrospective of the storied group. Wax-Work Echoes and Hold Onto I.D. are the latest releases in a multiyear reissue effort that includes several LPs, a comprehensive CD box set, and a nearly five-hundred-page book.
27,00€
In stock
LP
THE SHADOW RING
“Hold Onto I.D.”
Recorded from late 1996 through early 1997, Hold Onto I.D., The Shadow Ring’s fourth album, marks the apogee of the trio’s experimental rock epoch—their last record clinging to their factitious bandness before they let all song and structure go awash in sonic malaise for their final run of releases on Swill Radio. The surrealist dreams of City Lights and Put the Music in Its Coffin give way to pseudo-expressionistic lyrics mired in the banality and bleakness of the everyday, set against the backdrop of the Coombe House (as pictured on the album’s cover). While Hold Onto I.D. is the group’s most overtly autobiographical release to date, Graham Lambkin’s lyrics obfuscate his expressionist tendencies filtering them through the codes and languages of officialdom, linking the “inner self” with documents of the state—identification cards, National Insurance numbers, and British passport numbers.
Having moved out of their parents’ homes and into the top floor of the famed Coombe House, Lambkin and Darren Harris set out to rework material drafted over the previous year, aided by Tim Goss, still safely in residence at the “Valebrook Inn.” While the familiar sounds of Harris’s deadpan recitation and Lambkin’s electric guitar, amateurishly strummed, dominate the album, the emotive interludes of Goss’s keyboards populate the record along with of home-cooked tape experiments and dime-store concrète. Originally released on CD and supported by a US tour with friends Scott Foust and Karla Borecky’s Idea Fire Company, Hold Onto I.D. is perhaps the band’s best-known and most accessible album. (The Shadow Ring’s sole representative on a streaming platform, it was once acknowledged by the Guardian as one of “the 101 strangest records on Spotify.”) Offered here for the first time on vinyl, Hold Onto I.D. is an essential album for both completists and the uninitiated alike.
Throughout their legendary, decade-long run, The Shadow Ring were an enigmatic force on the international musical sub-underground. Before their disbandment in 2002, this shambolic rock outfit, formed by a group of rowdy teenagers in southeast England, left behind a mighty run of eight LPs, a handful of 7"s, and a spate of raucous live shows and cryptic zine appearances on both sides of the Atlantic, all which have bolstered their enduring word-of-mouth mystique. Beginning in 2023 with the first-ever vinyl pressing of the self-released pre–Shadow Ring tape The Cat & Bells Club (1992), Blank Forms Editions has been conducting a systematic retrospective of the storied group. Wax-Work Echoes and Hold Onto I.D. are the latest releases in a multiyear reissue effort that includes several LPs, a comprehensive CD box set, and a nearly five-hundred-page book.
27,00€
Out of stock
CD
Ellen ARKBRO
“Nightclouds”
Ellen Arkbro’s fourth album, Nightclouds, collects five improvisations for solo organ, recorded across Central Europe in 2023–24. Nightclouds is more unabashedly Romantic and introspective than her previous efforts, though it remains firmly rooted in the rigor and precision that have come to define Arkbro’s concept. Extending her previous explorations of spatialized harmony, tactility, and texture, Arkbro draws equally on sacred music, ECM–style jazz, and downtown minimalism, conjuring a cool intimacy and tone. Her decelerationist chordal improvisations envelop the listener in dirge-like washes, while her close miking reveals the rough haptic grain of the reeds, bringing the listener both inside and outside the sound. Evoking Kjell Johnsen and Jan Garbarek’s duets, or La Monte Young and Tony Conrad’s take on Euringer and Harmer’s cowboy song “Oh Bury Me Not,” Nightclouds channels spiritual pathos through a rigorously restrained architecture.
Following up on last year’s Sounds While Waiting (W.25TH, 2024), a selection of stereo mixes documenting Arkbro’s spatial organ installations, Nightclouds (her first for Blank Forms and for co-publisher La Becque Editions) shifts direction, focusing on instant composition and improvisation. Elegant, simple chordal scaffolds support rich, ever-shifting textures; listening closely necessitates surrender to sustained irresolution. Bookending a collection of short pieces are two variations on the titular composition, “Nightclouds,” which capture Arkbro performing simultaneously on the Sauer organ and Utopa Baroque organ at Orgelpark in Amsterdam. The composition is a sly nod to British jazz guitarist Allan Holdsworth: The first take slows down and stretches out a continuously modulated harmonic progression, while the short closing version simply loops three chords. Situated between these tracks are “Still Life” and “Chordalities,” two short works recorded at the Temple de La-Tour-de-Peilz in Vevey, Switzerland, where Arkbro spent a summer stay and additional recording stints at La Becque | Artist Residency. While the former registers only a few subtle changes against a sustained chord, “Chordalities,” played entirely on the organ stops, unspools in a billowing progression, culminating in a modernist angularity absent from the other compositions. The second half of the album is given to “Morningclouds,” a sprawling work recorded in the reconstructed Gedächtniskirche (Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church) in Berlin. Whereas the shorter works are harmonic studies, “Morningclouds” foregrounds Arkbro’s attention to form and structure, interweaving two returning themes that are reminiscent of her approach in For Organ and Brass (Subtext, 2017). Arkbro’s concise musical vocabulary and formal architecture evoke a sense of emotional ambivalence, simultaneously uplifting and mournful, guiding the listener through a spectrum of feeling with a cool and distant beauty. Nightclouds stands as a profound statement in Arkbro’s evolving body of work, at once introspective and expansive, the album reaffirms her singular ability to transform harmonic simplicity into deeply affecting sonic landscapes, inviting listeners into a space of contemplation and emotional depth.
Ellen Arkbro (b. 1990) is a composer, musician, and sound artist working with precision-tuned intervallic harmony and installation. Arkbro composes for acoustic instruments, synthetic sounds, and combinations of the two. Despite her works’ scale and precision, the result is rarely a dry exercise in process; Arkbro draws from a vivid array of musical vocabularies—namely, her studies with La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Jung Hee Choi, and Marc Sabat; jazz and blues scales and pop modalities; electroacoustic music and sound synthesis; and her time in Catherine Christer Hennix’s Kamigaku Ensemble. She originally trained as a singer with a focus on jazz, changed paths to study at the Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), and ultimately received a degree in Electroacoustic Music Composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. Her work has been supported by residencies at Somerset House in London, Blank Forms in New York, La Becque Résidence d’artistes in La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, and the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in Troy, New York, as well as numerous grants, including the ten-year work grant from the Swedish Arts Council. She has presented her site-specific work at Barbican in London, Kölner Philharmonie, Serralves in Porto, Oude Kerk in Amsterdam, Silent Green in Berlin, Ina GRM in Paris, and Tempelaukkio Kirke in Helsinki. In all aspects of her practice, Arkbro focuses on the qualities of harmonic sound that reveal listening as an active process of creative participation, inviting the listener to gradually transform into the sound itself.
18,00€
In stock
LP
Ellen ARKBRO
“Nightclouds”
Ellen Arkbro’s fourth album, Nightclouds, collects five improvisations for solo organ, recorded across Central Europe in 2023–24. Nightclouds is more unabashedly Romantic and introspective than her previous efforts, though it remains firmly rooted in the rigor and precision that have come to define Arkbro’s concept. Extending her previous explorations of spatialized harmony, tactility, and texture, Arkbro draws equally on sacred music, ECM–style jazz, and downtown minimalism, conjuring a cool intimacy and tone. Her decelerationist chordal improvisations envelop the listener in dirge-like washes, while her close miking reveals the rough haptic grain of the reeds, bringing the listener both inside and outside the sound. Evoking Kjell Johnsen and Jan Garbarek’s duets, or La Monte Young and Tony Conrad’s take on Euringer and Harmer’s cowboy song “Oh Bury Me Not,” Nightclouds channels spiritual pathos through a rigorously restrained architecture.
Following up on last year’s Sounds While Waiting (W.25TH, 2024), a selection of stereo mixes documenting Arkbro’s spatial organ installations, Nightclouds (her first for Blank Forms and for co-publisher La Becque Editions) shifts direction, focusing on instant composition and improvisation. Elegant, simple chordal scaffolds support rich, ever-shifting textures; listening closely necessitates surrender to sustained irresolution. Bookending a collection of short pieces are two variations on the titular composition, “Nightclouds,” which capture Arkbro performing simultaneously on the Sauer organ and Utopa Baroque organ at Orgelpark in Amsterdam. The composition is a sly nod to British jazz guitarist Allan Holdsworth: The first take slows down and stretches out a continuously modulated harmonic progression, while the short closing version simply loops three chords. Situated between these tracks are “Still Life” and “Chordalities,” two short works recorded at the Temple de La-Tour-de-Peilz in Vevey, Switzerland, where Arkbro spent a summer stay and additional recording stints at La Becque | Artist Residency. While the former registers only a few subtle changes against a sustained chord, “Chordalities,” played entirely on the organ stops, unspools in a billowing progression, culminating in a modernist angularity absent from the other compositions. The second half of the album is given to “Morningclouds,” a sprawling work recorded in the reconstructed Gedächtniskirche (Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church) in Berlin. Whereas the shorter works are harmonic studies, “Morningclouds” foregrounds Arkbro’s attention to form and structure, interweaving two returning themes that are reminiscent of her approach in For Organ and Brass (Subtext, 2017). Arkbro’s concise musical vocabulary and formal architecture evoke a sense of emotional ambivalence, simultaneously uplifting and mournful, guiding the listener through a spectrum of feeling with a cool and distant beauty. Nightclouds stands as a profound statement in Arkbro’s evolving body of work, at once introspective and expansive, the album reaffirms her singular ability to transform harmonic simplicity into deeply affecting sonic landscapes, inviting listeners into a space of contemplation and emotional depth.
Ellen Arkbro (b. 1990) is a composer, musician, and sound artist working with precision-tuned intervallic harmony and installation. Arkbro composes for acoustic instruments, synthetic sounds, and combinations of the two. Despite her works’ scale and precision, the result is rarely a dry exercise in process; Arkbro draws from a vivid array of musical vocabularies—namely, her studies with La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Jung Hee Choi, and Marc Sabat; jazz and blues scales and pop modalities; electroacoustic music and sound synthesis; and her time in Catherine Christer Hennix’s Kamigaku Ensemble. She originally trained as a singer with a focus on jazz, changed paths to study at the Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), and ultimately received a degree in Electroacoustic Music Composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. Her work has been supported by residencies at Somerset House in London, Blank Forms in New York, La Becque Résidence d’artistes in La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, and the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in Troy, New York, as well as numerous grants, including the ten-year work grant from the Swedish Arts Council. She has presented her site-specific work at Barbican in London, Kölner Philharmonie, Serralves in Porto, Oude Kerk in Amsterdam, Silent Green in Berlin, Ina GRM in Paris, and Tempelaukkio Kirke in Helsinki. In all aspects of her practice, Arkbro focuses on the qualities of harmonic sound that reveal listening as an active process of creative participation, inviting the listener to gradually transform into the sound itself.
28,00€
Out of stock
CD
Hanne LIPPARD – Ellen ARKBRO – Hampus LINDWALL
“How Do I Know If My Cat Likes Me?”
Hanne Lippard, Ellen Arkbro, and Hampus Lindwall’s How do I know if my cat likes me? is an existential meditation on the empty expanses of our automated everyday—corporatized minimalism tinged with cool formalism, structured by the deft deployment of sonic and lyrical repetition. By untethering sound from meaning through a pleasurably numbing cycle of repetition, the album satirizes the stultifying aesthetics of alienated life—from hold music to online banking—with a prim, deadpan delivery.
Conceived when Lippard and Arkbro were both in residence at La Becque in La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland (and recorded in part on the organs of that same town’s Temple Saint-Théodule), How do I know if my cat likes me? is a long-awaited collaboration from the trio they formed with Lindwall. Throughout, Arkbro and Lindwall’s ascetic organ accompaniment provides a tonal landscape that is both intuitive and enigmatic, while Lippard’s recitation ensnares the listener in a tautological customer-service loop where language shifts from pure function to pure aesthetic. How do I know if my cat likes me? opens with an interpretation of Phil Harmonic’s classic 1978 composition “Timing,” originally written for and performed by “Blue” Gene Tyranny. Harmonic, a Cagian who resisted the authoritarian strictures of notation, wrote a piece that invites the performer to make “subtle and thoughtful changes” based on pre-recorded audio cues—“Change now”—designed to capture his idiosyncratic sense of timing. “The Long Goodbye” imagines an unending dialogue between automated acquaintances who try to politely disengage with the same few parting words, perpetually on the verge of separation. Meanwhile, “Modern Spanking” paronomastically free-associates from sterile conveniences to illicit erotics. Drifting from “online banking” to “breathing down your neck banking” and “sexy, but bankrupt, banking,” it sketches a world of perfunctory pleasures whose sadism is more indebted to Jamie Dimon than Marquis de Sade. The album wraps up with a rendition of “At Last I Am Free,” Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers’ disco breakup anthem, notably reinterpreted by Robert Wyatt as a world-weary yet triumphant protest song. Amid the monotonous absurdities of How do I know if my cat likes me?, “At Last I Am Free” takes on a haunting irony. With its eternally ambiguous refrain—“I can hardly see in front of me”—the song calls into question the very fact of freedom (perhaps as an antidote to Harmonic’s Cagianism). Existential angst dissolves into hypnagogic detachment.
How do I know if my cat likes me? recalls David Rosenboom and Jacqueline Humbert’s Daytime Viewing (1979–80) (Unseen Worlds, 2013), a highly stylized, puckish stream of soap-operatic scenes and sales channel segments, punctuated by Humbert’s listless narration and Rosenboom and Willie Winant’s drum machines, claves, and maracas. The album also nods to Paul DeMarinis’s Songs Without Throats (Black Truffle, 2019), a compilation of tracks from the 1970s in which all the lyrics are recited by Speak & Spell machines. Constantly poking at the porous membrane between sound and meaning, poetry and song, or playful irreverence and existentialism, How do I know if my cat likes me? is a portal into a fantastical, unforgettable, organic-synthetic world.
Hanne Lippard is an artist who has been using language as the raw material for her work for the last decade, processing it in the form of texts, vocal performances, sound installations, printed objects and sculpture.
Ellen Arkbro is a composer, musician, and sound artist working with precision-tuned intervallic harmony and installation. She focuses on the qualities of harmonic sound that reveal listening as an active process of creative participation, inviting the listener to gradually transform into the sound itself.
Hampus Lindwall is an artist, organist, and composer. Since 2005, he has been the Titular Organist in Saint-Esprit, Paris.
18,00€
In stock
LP
Hanne LIPPARD – Ellen ARKBRO – Hampus LINDWALL
“How Do I Know If My Cat Likes Me?”
Hanne Lippard, Ellen Arkbro, and Hampus Lindwall’s How do I know if my cat likes me? is an existential meditation on the empty expanses of our automated everyday—corporatized minimalism tinged with cool formalism, structured by the deft deployment of sonic and lyrical repetition. By untethering sound from meaning through a pleasurably numbing cycle of repetition, the album satirizes the stultifying aesthetics of alienated life—from hold music to online banking—with a prim, deadpan delivery.
Conceived when Lippard and Arkbro were both in residence at La Becque in La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland (and recorded in part on the organs of that same town’s Temple Saint-Théodule), How do I know if my cat likes me? is a long-awaited collaboration from the trio they formed with Lindwall. Throughout, Arkbro and Lindwall’s ascetic organ accompaniment provides a tonal landscape that is both intuitive and enigmatic, while Lippard’s recitation ensnares the listener in a tautological customer-service loop where language shifts from pure function to pure aesthetic. How do I know if my cat likes me? opens with an interpretation of Phil Harmonic’s classic 1978 composition “Timing,” originally written for and performed by “Blue” Gene Tyranny. Harmonic, a Cagian who resisted the authoritarian strictures of notation, wrote a piece that invites the performer to make “subtle and thoughtful changes” based on pre-recorded audio cues—“Change now”—designed to capture his idiosyncratic sense of timing. “The Long Goodbye” imagines an unending dialogue between automated acquaintances who try to politely disengage with the same few parting words, perpetually on the verge of separation. Meanwhile, “Modern Spanking” paronomastically free-associates from sterile conveniences to illicit erotics. Drifting from “online banking” to “breathing down your neck banking” and “sexy, but bankrupt, banking,” it sketches a world of perfunctory pleasures whose sadism is more indebted to Jamie Dimon than Marquis de Sade. The album wraps up with a rendition of “At Last I Am Free,” Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers’ disco breakup anthem, notably reinterpreted by Robert Wyatt as a world-weary yet triumphant protest song. Amid the monotonous absurdities of How do I know if my cat likes me?, “At Last I Am Free” takes on a haunting irony. With its eternally ambiguous refrain—“I can hardly see in front of me”—the song calls into question the very fact of freedom (perhaps as an antidote to Harmonic’s Cagianism). Existential angst dissolves into hypnagogic detachment.
How do I know if my cat likes me? recalls David Rosenboom and Jacqueline Humbert’s Daytime Viewing (1979–80) (Unseen Worlds, 2013), a highly stylized, puckish stream of soap-operatic scenes and sales channel segments, punctuated by Humbert’s listless narration and Rosenboom and Willie Winant’s drum machines, claves, and maracas. The album also nods to Paul DeMarinis’s Songs Without Throats (Black Truffle, 2019), a compilation of tracks from the 1970s in which all the lyrics are recited by Speak & Spell machines. Constantly poking at the porous membrane between sound and meaning, poetry and song, or playful irreverence and existentialism, How do I know if my cat likes me? is a portal into a fantastical, unforgettable, organic-synthetic world.
Hanne Lippard is an artist who has been using language as the raw material for her work for the last decade, processing it in the form of texts, vocal performances, sound installations, printed objects and sculpture.
Ellen Arkbro is a composer, musician, and sound artist working with precision-tuned intervallic harmony and installation. She focuses on the qualities of harmonic sound that reveal listening as an active process of creative participation, inviting the listener to gradually transform into the sound itself.
Hampus Lindwall is an artist, organist, and composer. Since 2005, he has been the Titular Organist in Saint-Esprit, Paris.
28,00€
In stock
LP
Catherine Christer HENNIX
“Further Selections from the Electric Harpsichord”
Rediscovered and compiled for release shortly before her death in November 2023, Further Selections from the Electric Harpsichord presents a never-before-heard recording of composer and artist Catherine Christer Hennix’s early magnum opus. Originally debuted in 1976 at the festival Brouwer’s Lattice at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, The Electric Harpsichord has steadily mystified fans and students of Western minimalist music for its implacable, transformative qualities, and the long-held, relative obscurity of its creator. Like the work of Hennix’s close friend La Monte Young, the piece is set in just intonation and focuses on the transcendental potentials of precise tuning, inspired by their studies with Pandit Pran Nath. Composed of bursts of oscillating, synthetic tones using a carefully retuned synthesizer and a tape-based system for feedback delay, the sounds swirl, twinkle, and appear to bend time, space, and perception. Additional, sustained chords on the sheng, most likely played by her Deontic Miracle bandmate Hans Isgren, are present at the opening of the piece and reemerge towards the end of the recording.
The release of Further Selections constitutes the most comprehensive original recording of this foundational work to date. Originally billed as The Well-Tuned Organ during its debut in Sweden, The Electric Harpsichord has developed a legendary reputation, predicated on a twenty-six minute fragment salvaged and circulated by Hennix’s friend Henry Flynt. Promoting its importance on multiple occasions, Flynt aired the work on WBAI radio, organized a pair of tape concerts at New York alternative arts spaces in 1970s, and later penned a 1998 essay which served as the liner notes to its eventual CD release in 2010. For him, this work not only represented a sterling milestone in minimal sonic aesthetics, but also spawned a new genre that he dubbed “hallucinogenic/ecstatic sound environments (HESE),” which in turn inspired his own drone-like compositions. Gradually, interest in the recording led to a spate of archival projects, public performances, and new compositions by Hennix in the 2010s, in turn drawing into focus her multifarious practice, which includes serious contributions towards mathematics, poetry, sculpture, Noh drama, philosophy, and light art.
28,00€
In stock
CD
Catherine Christer HENNIX
“Further Selections from the Electric Harpsichord”
Rediscovered and compiled for release shortly before her death in November 2023, Further Selections from the Electric Harpsichord presents a never-before-heard recording of composer and artist Catherine Christer Hennix’s early magnum opus. Originally debuted in 1976 at the festival Brouwer’s Lattice at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, The Electric Harpsichord has steadily mystified fans and students of Western minimalist music for its implacable, transformative qualities, and the long-held, relative obscurity of its creator. Like the work of Hennix’s close friend La Monte Young, the piece is set in just intonation and focuses on the transcendental potentials of precise tuning, inspired by their studies with Pandit Pran Nath. Composed of bursts of oscillating, synthetic tones using a carefully retuned synthesizer and a tape-based system for feedback delay, the sounds swirl, twinkle, and appear to bend time, space, and perception. Additional, sustained chords on the sheng, most likely played by her Deontic Miracle bandmate Hans Isgren, are present at the opening of the piece and reemerge towards the end of the recording.
The release of Further Selections constitutes the most comprehensive original recording of this foundational work to date. Originally billed as The Well-Tuned Organ during its debut in Sweden, The Electric Harpsichord has developed a legendary reputation, predicated on a twenty-six minute fragment salvaged and circulated by Hennix’s friend Henry Flynt. Promoting its importance on multiple occasions, Flynt aired the work on WBAI radio, organized a pair of tape concerts at New York alternative arts spaces in 1970s, and later penned a 1998 essay which served as the liner notes to its eventual CD release in 2010. For him, this work not only represented a sterling milestone in minimal sonic aesthetics, but also spawned a new genre that he dubbed “hallucinogenic/ecstatic sound environments (HESE),” which in turn inspired his own drone-like compositions. Gradually, interest in the recording led to a spate of archival projects, public performances, and new compositions by Hennix in the 2010s, in turn drawing into focus her multifarious practice, which includes serious contributions towards mathematics, poetry, sculpture, Noh drama, philosophy, and light art.
17,00€
In stock
LP
Charlemagne PALESTINE
“DINGGGDONGGGDINGGGzzzzzzz ferrrr SSSOFTTT DIVINI TIESSSSS!!!!!!!!!”
DINGGGDONGGGDINGGGzzzzzzz!!!!!!! In the newest record by the iconoclastic Brooklyn-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 at the artist’s studio in Belgium—a high-ceiling, stuffed-animal-packed paradise he calls Charleworld—among friends and “divinities,” his name for the thousands of plush toys he’s amassed since the ’60s. On the flip side, Blank Forms Editions’ very first and long-out-of-print release appears on vinyl for the first time: a cathartic street recording of the maximalist composer’s 2018 musical eulogy for his late friend Tony Conrad, performed on the bells of St. Thomas Episcopal Church, where the two first met. Two mesmerizing “klanggdedangggebannggg” sessions in the Quasimodo of 53rd Street’s inimitable, trance-induced style.
Perhaps more than any of his contemporaries in the bustling, cross-disciplinary downtown New York arts scene of the ’60s and ’70s, Charlemagne Palestine (b. 1947) has embodied the notion of the artist as playful polymath, testing and transcending nearly every creative form imaginable in his more than six-decade career. Originally trained in Jewish sacred singing to be a cantor, he began his artistic life as a musician, studying piano and accordion, accompanying figures like Tiny Tim and Allen Ginsberg on percussion, using early synthesizers as an assistant to Alwin Nikolais, and eventually landing a long-running gig as the carillonneur at Midtown’s St. Thomas Episcopal. This libertine spirit of experimentation soon led to adventures in other aesthetic arenas: making kinetic light sculptures with Len Lye, devising choreographed performances with Simone Forti, and producing a series of visceral videotapes with the Castelli-Sonnabend collection. In the ’70s, he was particularly prominent on the burgeoning loft movement, becoming well-known for his sparse, intense, and exacting long-form piano concerts that seemed to bend the very nature of time and space. Beginning in the ’80s, he spent decades in self-imposed exile from the new music scene, living variously in Europe and Hawai'i and privately honing his hermetic sonic and visual practice. This was followed by a period of triumphant resurgence beginning in the mid-’90s, since which he has performed and exhibited globally.
28,00€
Out of stock
10 CD box
Florian HECKER
“Resynthese FAVN”
Resynthese FAVN is a ten-CD box set and publication presenting a new realization of Florian Hecker’s 2017 thirteen-channel installation of the same name. First exhibited at Kunsthalle Wien in the exhibition “Halluzination, Perspektive, Synthese,” and elaborating upon ideas first presented in the 2016 project FAVN, the ten works that comprise Resynthese FAVN present iterations of a synthetic timbre produced using machine-listening processes of analysis and further resynthesis —the sonification of a machine caught in the act of listening to itself. Accompanying the audio are three booklets containing three new essays offering critical and historical context for the work, developed in collaboration with the British publisher Urbanomic.
FAVN and its resynthesis point back to Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1876 poem “L’Après-Midi d’un Faun,” and its subsequent musical and choreographic interpretations by Claude Debussy and Vaslav Nijinsky. A faun, straddling reverie and reality, recounts a sensuous meeting with several nymphs. It is unclear whether the experience was an illusion; asks the faun, “Did I love a dream?” Hecker, in turn, asks listeners to examine their own sensory perceptions. What forms do our human minds make out of the algorithmic timbres and synthetic voices that unspool across the versions of Resynthese FAVN? Sound drags, ascends, chirps, warps, and growls with manic irregularity. Definite but indescribable differences emerge across the ten 53-minute tracks. Language—occasionally emerging through a synthetic voice, sourced from a libretto written by Robin Mackay—proves unstable within the hallucinatory textures set loose by Hecker’s composition. As chimeric shapes materialize and fade away, one might further ask: are we listening for the faun, or do we become faun through listening? Across the three newly published essays, Quentin Meillassoux contextualizes the character of the faun in Mallarmé’s poem; Noé Soulier assesses the embodied translation of “L’Après-Midi d’un Faun” in Nijinsky’s 1912 ballet; and Han Han and Vincent Lostanlen consider the trajectory of timbre, from the enlightenment to our computational present.
Florian Hecker is a German artist whose works across synthetic sound, installation, and performance consider sensory perception and the audience's auditory experience. He has collaborated with artists including Aphex Twin, Cerith Wyn Evans, Russell Haswell, Mark Leckey, and Yasunao Tone.
Written and produced by Florian Hecker, 2017/2024
Texture and voice analysis and resynthesis algorithms: Axel Röbel, and members of the Analysis/ Synthesis Team, IRCAM, Paris
Sound spatialization design: Alberto de Campo
Original FAVN libretto: Robin Mackay
Mastering: Rashad Becker
95,00€
Out of stock
4 LP box
Graham LAMBKIN
“Solos”
The years between Graham Lambkin’s tenure with the legendary Shadow Ring and his more recent improvisational duos mark a distinct period of creative production within the artist’s insular career. Living with his family in Poughkeepsie, NY, from 2001 through 2011 Lambkin recorded and self-released four solo albums that valorized mundane domestic situations while reveling in the liminal spaces between the acts of listening, recording, and producing. Created through an ingenious economy of means, these solo records are as beguilingly seductive as they are uncanny. Perpetually laughing in his own duplicitous face, Lambkin breathed new life into musique concrète and sound poetry, giving outmoded forms a contemporary consciousness while setting the gold standard for a continuously unfolding canon of 21st century tape music.
Poem (For Voice & Tape), Salmon Run, Softly Softly Copy Copy, and Amateur Doubles are now remastered and finally back in print, with Salmon Run and Softly Softly Copy Copy available on vinyl for the first time. This deluxe boxed set of Graham Lambkin’s first four solo records includes an expansive 42-page book featuring unseen photos and reproductions of artworks as well as essays and anecdotal recollections providing fresh insight and divulging hermetic secrets by Ed Atkins, Mark Harwood, Matt Krefting, Lawrence Kumpf, Samara Lubelski, and Adrian Rew.
Graham Lambkin (b. 1973, Dover, England) is a multidisciplinary artist who first came to prominence in the early ‘90s through the formation of his experimental music group The Shadow Ring. As 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. His Kye imprint, founded in 2001, was an instrumental platform for the dissemination of and dialogue between work by an intergenerational cast of artists using sound, including Henning Christiansen, Anton Heyboer, Moniek Darge, and Gabi Losoncy. He began showing his visual art in 2014 with Came To Call Mine, an exhibition curated by Lawrence Kumpf and Justin Luke at Audio Visual Arts in conjunction with the publication of Lambkin’s children’s book (for adults) of the same name, and has since exhibited his work at 356 Mission, Künstlerhaus, PiK, and Blank Forms.
99,00€
Out of stock
CD
Judith HAMANN
“Music for cello and humming”
Nomadic Australian cellist and composer Judith Hamann presents two collections of her sonic inquiries into shaking and humming. Her CD, Music for Cello and Humming, features two pieces for cello and humming written specifically for Hamann by composers Sarah Hennies and Anthony Pateras alongside Hamann's own "Humming Suite" and "Study for Cello and Humming." Having arisen intuitively from Hamann's investigations into shaking, just intonation, psychoacoustic phenomena, and the voice in relation to the femme presenting body in performance, humming here also references dislocation, or ventriloquism. Although teetering on the edge of audibility, the intimate and vulnerable closed-mouth sounding enters into subtle interference with her cello, drifting into acoustical beating and bringing instability to otherwise more formal grid structures. The capacity for rupture of this volatile fragility reaches its apotheosis on Hennies' "Loss," a piece that deliberately instructs Hamann to hum beyond the limits of her voice range. Going against the grain of chamber music orthodoxy, the guaranteed failure set in motion by this instruction yields a generative sound of effort reminiscent of Xenakis's storied desire for an instrumentalist to play with the sorrow of knowing they can't do everything. With an arc suggestive of sudden life change, "Loss" casts queer epistemology onto composition, positioning failure, undoing, unbecoming, and transforming as alternative ways of knowing or being. Hennies's signature composite merging of individual components here brings oral sounds that include breathing and coughing together with humming, cello, and sine waves. Like Glenn Gould's 1982 Goldberg Variations or Pauline Oliveros's Accordion and Voice, this timbral meeting of bodily utterances with consummate musicianship imbues Hamann's humming work with a breakable, human strand, here as humbling as it is uncomfortable. Music for Cello and Humming is accompanied by an essay on both recordings by Nora Fulton. It's presented alongside the LP set, Shaking Studies (BF 017LP). Judith Hamann undertook her doctoral studies with renowned cellist Charles Curtis, with whom she is currently engaged in a discourse-based project, "Materialities of Realisation." She has additionally demonstrated a superlative capacity for improvisation and engagement with sonic arts through work with artists Dennis Cooper, Éliane Radigue, Áine O'Dwyer, Ilan Volkov, Toshimaru Nakamura, La Monte Young, and Marian Zazeela, Golden Fur, Jessika Kenney, Anna Homler, Yvette Janine Jackson, and Lori Goldston, among others. Her recorded appearances include Tashi Wada's Duets, Graham Lambkin's Community, Alvin Lucier's Illuminated By The Moon, and Gossamers, with Rosalind Hall. Edition of 500.
17,00€
In stock
LP
Judith HAMANN
“Shaking Studies”
Nomadic Australian cellist and composer Judith Hamann presents two collections of her sonic inquiries into shaking and humming. Her LP, Shaking Studies, is a collection of iterative cello performance that foregrounds shaking as a generative subject. In addition to an arsenal of techniques for registrable shaking, Hamann's conception of the term emphasizes micro and macro pulsing, including tremors, vibrato, wolf tones, and complex partial activity. Hamann begins with a sphygmological reading of the pulse of her cello, inciting it to shake audibly and visually as a symbiotic basis for determining the rate of her own left hand's tremor and consequent direction of resonant frequencies. Following a thorough harmonic investigation of her shaking practice in two parts, she directs us to look outwards, combining beating chordal structures with electronics and recordings of real world shaking. From inner pulse to more macrocosmic quaking, Hamann's alternative conception of shaking rejects measurement and regularity, order and control, instead alluding to a more responsive and intuitive mode of convulsive sounding. It's presented alongside the CD set, Music for Cello and Humming (BF 018CD). Judith Hamann undertook her doctoral studies with renowned cellist Charles Curtis, with whom she is currently engaged in a discourse-based project, "Materialities of Realisation." She has additionally demonstrated a superlative capacity for improvisation and engagement with sonic arts through work with artists Dennis Cooper, Éliane Radigue, Áine O'Dwyer, Ilan Volkov, Toshimaru Nakamura, La Monte Young, and Marian Zazeela, Golden Fur, Jessika Kenney, Anna Homler, Yvette Janine Jackson, and Lori Goldston, among others. Her recorded appearances include Tashi Wada's Duets, Graham Lambkin's Community, Alvin Lucier's Illuminated By The Moon, and Gossamers, with Rosalind Hall. Edition of 500.
21,50€
Out of stock
2 LP
Catherine Christer HENNIX – CHORA(S)SAN TIME-COURT MIRAGE
“Blues Alif Lam Mim”
Having already unearthed three collections of archival 1970s recordings by Catherine Christer Hennix, Blank Forms continues their annual illumination of the visionary Swedish composer's music by turning to more recent work with this first-time vinyl edition of Hennix's Blues Alif Lam Mim in the Mode of Rag Infinity/Rag Cosmosis, a 2014 piece first released as a CD in 2016. The double album captures the April 22, 2014 premiere of the composition by the Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage, Hennix's expanded just intonation ensemble, featuring a brass section of Amir ElSaffar, Paul Schwingenschlögl, Hilary Jeffery, Elena Kakaliagou, and Robin Hayward; live electronics by Stefan Tiedje and Marcus Pal; and voice by Amirtha Kidambi, Imam Ahmet Muhsin Tüzer, and Hennix herself. Intended to reveal the origins of the blues in the Eastern musical traditions of raga and makam, Blues Alif Lam Mim in the Mode of Rag Infinity/Rag Cosmosis has its roots in Hennix's 2013 realization of an Illuminatory Sound Environment, a concept developed in 1978 by anti-artist Henry Flynt on the basis of Hennix's own The Electric Harpsichord. As Hennix explains in Other Matters, Blank Forms' 2019 collection of her writings: "Rag Infinity/Rag Cosmosis presents fragments of 'raga-like' frequency constellations following distinct cycles and permuting their order, creating a simultaneity of 'multi-universes.' When two such 'universes' come in proximity of each other and begin unfolding simultaneously along distinct cycles, there is a kaleidoscopic exfoliation of frequencies as one universe is becoming two, but not separated -- the effect of cosmosis is entrained, binding two or more frequency universes into proximity where their modal properties interact and blend, creating in the process entirely new microtonal constellations in an omnidirectional simultaneous cosmic order with phenomenologically 'transfinite' Poincaré cycles (cyclic returns to initial conditions). As with Hennix's best work, the organic unfolding of this quivering drone belies a precision that opens onto the infinitesimal. Over this mesmerizing ebb and flow, vocalists incant an Arabic-language devotional poem written by Hennix that features quotations in praise of Allah from the Quran. Also reproduced on the album's gatefold jacket is Hennix's elegant reduction of the sacred text, represented as the first letter of its first line gradually paired down to a single dot, which invites the contemplator to bring their inner knowledge to the composition for use as a meditation prompt. Listeners without spiritual inclinations, but who are willing to immerse themselves in the music, will find the work's serene intensity to be its own reward."
36,00€
In stock
CD
Maryanne AMACHER
“Petra”
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 challenge key assumptions about the capacities and limitations of the genre. Amacher's work anticipates some of the most important developments in network culture, media arts, acoustic ecology, and sound studies, yet due to its expansive interdisciplinary nature, it has rarely been documented. Following two CDs for Tzadik and her inclusion in the monumental collection OHM: The Early Gurus Of Electronic Music (1948-1980), this publication of Amacher's 1991 piece Petra marks her first commercially available instrumental work.
Petra was originally commissioned for the ICSM World Music Days in Boswil, Switzerland. Written for two pianos, the piece is a unique example of Amacher's late work, a direct extension of her working methodologies for electronic composition taken into an acoustic realm that alludes to the music of Giacinto Scelsi and Galina Ustvolskaya. Petra 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.
This solemn interpretation of Petra was recorded at its 2017 American premiere at New York's St. Peter's Episcopal Church with pianists 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. Weighing tranquilizing passages of glacially-paced serenity against stretches of dilapidated, jagged dissonance, the recording illuminates a crucial node in the constellation of Amacher's enigmatic oeuvre.
13,50€