The tenth and final anthology from Blank Forms 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, 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 synthesizer work Trilogie de la Mort (1988–93) 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.”

"In May 1977 Derek Bailey gave me a press ticket for Company Week - a series of concerts of improvised music in London. I made some notes at the time, but there seemed to be nowhere suitable to publish the extended commentary I eventually produced. So I wrote it into a dummy book and it to Derek. Most of it is reproduced here." Peter Riley 1994  Original copies of this rare and invaluable document. 

This catalogue presents the first career encompassing, in-depth analysis of her work. Featuring never-before-pub lished archival material, musical notations, drawings, and photographs, as well as an insightful conversation with the artist, the essays underscore Monk’s lasting influence and affirm the relevance of her work for the present. “I WORK BETWEEN THE CRACKS, WHERE THE VOICE STARTS DANCING”To say that Meredith Monk is an outstanding singer, com poser, choreographer and filmmaker says a lot and yet too little. Monk works seamlessly across disciplines―pushing the boundaries of music, theater, dance, video, and installation, and is considered a pioneer of site-specific perfor mance. At the center of her oeuvre is the suggestive power of the human voice: the body becomes a resonating space for a universal language for which there are no words. Monk was the first artist to create a performance for the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum, she performed in public car parks and on opera stages.

The chief aim of the review is to provide a space for critical discussion of, and enthusiasm for, new poetic work published by networks of small presses and/or by poets themselves; with a preference for reviews of work that is particularly ephemeral, hand-made, or limited in circulation. This is in order both to support new work (and poets) and celebrate the communities that make such publica(c)tion possible. Reviews can be academic but do not have to be. Likewise, all other guidelines are to be interpreted freely.  Submissions can be sent to baldanderspress@gmail.com Rolling deadline 

Charles Mingus is one of the most important-and most mythologized-composers and performers in jazz history. Classically trained and of mixed race, he was an outspoken innovator as well as a bandleader, composer, producer, and record-label owner. His vivid autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, has done much to shape the image of Mingus as something of a wild man: idiosyncratic musical genius with a penchant for skirt-chasing and violent outbursts. But, as the autobiography reveals, he was also a hopeless romantic. After exploring the most important events in Mingus's life, Krin Gabbard takes a careful look at Mingus as a writer as well as a composer and musician. He digs into how and why Mingus chose to do so much self-analysis, how he worked to craft his racial identity in a world that saw him simply as "black," and how his mental and physical health problems shaped his career. Gabbard sets aside the myth-making and convincingly argues that Charles Mingus created a unique language of emotions-and not just in music. Capturing many essential moments in jazz history anew, Better Git It in Your Soul will fascinate anyone who cares about jazz, African American history, and the artist's life.

HEARING is the long-awaited second book in a series of collaborations by Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino organized around each of the five senses. Their first collaboration in this series, Sight, was published by Edge Books in 1999. Hejinian and Scalapino were nearing the completion of HEARING when Leslie Scalapino died in 2010. Ten years later, the book is published for the first time with a preface by Hejinian and an afterword by Judith Goldman. "The forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present."--Karl Marx

Everybody’s Head is Open to Sound is the first publication devoted to Tom Wilson (1931–1978). Wilson started Transition Records in 1955, a pioneering label that painted a picture of vibrant jazz scenes from Boston to Memphis. Based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Transition came to prominence with releases featuring John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, and Donald Byrd, among others, before running out of money in 1958. Wilson then moved to New York and began an extensive career as an “A&R man” (artists and repertoire) for indie and major labels, crafting innovative productions at Columbia for Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel before signing the Velvet Underground, Nico, and the Mothers of Invention at MGM Records. His work as a record producer is as expansive as it is little known. Through newly commissioned essays from music historians Wolfram Knauer and Richie Unterberger, journalist Ignacio Juliá, and essayist Pacôme Thiellement, this book explores Wilson’s role in documenting avant-garde jazz, producing some of the key folk-rock recordings of the 1960s, and his daring collaborations with influential US rock bands. It also includes a rare full-length interview with Wilson and a selection of unpublished photographs. Everybody’s Head is Open to Sound tells the untold story of a visionary record producer.

In these letters, written to Fawwaz Traboulsi, sent from Barcelona, Aix-en-Provence, Skopelos, Murcia, Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome, and Beirut in lieu of an essay on feminism for a special issue of his magazine Zawaya on “Arab Women,” Etel Adnan unfolds startling meditations on gender, place, culture, landscape, vision, eros, illness, mortality, and war. Of Cities and Women is a philosophical and poetic tour de force.

In/somnia explores fissures within words as places where thought enters. Sleepless sleepers, we dream among ever more complex and hallucinatory `in/tense/in/season

Ephemeral and anarchic, Runes and Chords is the first collection of artwork by famed poet, critic and artist Alice Notley. These sketches, drawn on an iPad and first serialized on Notley’s Twitter feed, are a fascinating window into an evolving practice, collages of flowers and poetry, the white space of digital creation and overlaid colors erupting from the page. They defy containment and category, much like their creator—each a second in a day, an afternoon or evening in Paris, a thought so transient it can only exist in the medium of social media. With this collection, one of America’s most influential living poets and artists continues to prove her worthiness of that title.

"the Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo now has a translator worthy of his genius" César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza was a Peruvian poet, writer, playwright, and journalist. Although he published only two books of poetry during his lifetime, he is considered one of the great poetic innovators of the 20th century in any language.  He lived in Paris and Spain for much of his adult life. His body of work, which is deeply rooted in his European, Peruvian, and indigenous heritage, is increasingly recognized as a major contribution to global modernism. Sometimes called a surrealist poet, “Vallejo created a wrenching poetic language for Spanish that radically altered the shape of its imagery and the nature of its rhythms. … Vallejo forged a new discourse in order to express his own visceral compassion for human suffering,”

Cecilia Vicuña has embodied a life of political and social activism through poetry, visual art, film and performance. New and Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña is a telling of old cultures, modern nation states, and lives in exile. Rodrigo Toscano calls Vicuña's poetry "the outer out, beyond nation states, passed 'inter state' affairs, in other words, close in, as close as we get to our fair planet's sources, and to each other." In this bilingual collection, Vicuña and her translator, Rosa Alcalá, are artist witnesses to a natural world that is a storehouse of sacred words, seeds, threads, and songs. Present everywhere, they are sources for a rebalancing in human relationships and for new forms of grace and healing. In Vicuña's vision, art is life and intimacy with it is transformative.

The Coming Mental Range brings readers deep into the revolutionary poetics and philosophy of multi-disciplinary artist, writer, and musician Will Alexander. Gathering together a group of Alexander’s short prose writings in his signature “vertical philosophy” with essays in poetics touching on the work of admired artists and poets (Byron Baker, Wanda Coleman, Pablo Jofré, Bob Kaufman, and Ghérasim Luca to name a few), in addition to several key interviews with the author, The Coming Mental Range serves as a critical introduction to Alexander’s work and thought, and as a companion to volumes in poetry and philosophy like Divine Blue Light (City Lights, 2022), Refractive Africa (New Directions, 2021), and Towards the Primeval Lightning Field (O Books, 1998). In The Coming Mental Range, “language crystallizes as imaginal blazing, as musical incandescence,” and we are swept along in its roaring tides to other shores. As Alexander writes, “What is most concerning language must never fail at convincing, at emancipating its readership via transgressive spiral.”

Now available as a second edition with a new preface from the author, Will Alexander’s Towards The Primeval Lightning Field (O Books, 1998) is a work of “vertical philosophy” revealing the strata of cultures and language, like geological layers seen all at once. These essays comprise Alexander’s “search for origins outside the warrens of the visible,” revealing a singular imagination that moves with the force of a manifesto and the impossible dexterity of the unknown. Alexander’s virtuoso arpeggios of linguistic realms explore language and perceiving, and resonate far beyond the constrictions of the rational world.

Voyage, War, and Exile collects three essays by Etel Adnan that present a multilayered meditation on the author’s life within and without Beirut. Adnan reflects upon the intricacies of family, place, and language, asking what it means to be an Arab woman and writer in exile at the end of a century in which “Exile became the existential and metaphysical condition for every Arab.” At once deeply personal to the life of the author and yet ubiquitous in inquiry, Voyage, War, Exile pulls us into the shifting landscape of Lebanon and the United States in the 20th Century through a weaving of philosophical reflection and memory. This volume includes artwork by Simone Fattal.

The eternal rhythm is the vital conduit that links music through breath to life itself. Don Cherry certainly lived music. And his music is alive.When he says that music is breath he talks of something much bigger than the blow needed to make the trumpets sound. From his prime instrument, the trumpet, to his beloved ‘ngoni via flutes, piano and melodica Don Cherry’s voice is unique; like the man from which it springs, it is instantly recognisable whatever instrument or angle it is coming from. THE DON CHERRY TAPES laid the foundation in 1979 of the Cherry Archives which preserve the memory of Don and his extended tribal family. The archive began with a series of taped autobiographical interviews and a box of ephemera and mementoes. Now, 30 years after his death, those transcribed conversations are finally being published, illuminated by Don’s own artworks and augmented by the author Graeme Ewens’ tour journals and contemporaneous notes made over three decades of collaboration. The material included here is previously unpublished and is a kind of top- and-tail treatment of one of the Jazz Great’s personal experience, combining autobiographical background alongside his mentor Ornette Coleman with objective reportage from some of his later tours and personal anecdotes that offer a unique perspective from the writer who had become Don’s confidant, travel companion, witness and friend. They hung out together in the 1970s and between 1979 and 1984 were collaborating, collecting and collating material for a multimedia extravaganza that Don called ‘The Project’, which was picked up again in 1994. This would tell his story from the inside and from alongside, aiming to glimpse the essence of a cosmic traveller and multicultural ‘organic’ musician, from the spiritual high spots to the low points of the jazz life. The pages on his later years include personal reflections on his contemporary musical travellers and reveals details of his collaboration with John Coltrane. Special Edition limited to 300 copies 

An exploration of the production, transmission, and mutation of affective tonality—when sound helps produce a bad vibe. Sound can be deployed to produce discomfort, express a threat, or create an ambience of fear or dread—to produce a bad vibe. Sonic weapons of this sort include the “psychoacoustic correction” aimed at Panama strongman Manuel Noriega by the U.S. Army and at the Branch Davidians in Waco by the FBI, sonic booms (or “sound bombs”) over the Gaza Strip, and high-frequency rat repellants used against teenagers in malls. At the same time, artists and musicians generate intense frequencies in the search for new aesthetic experiences and new ways of mobilizing bodies in rhythm. In Sonic Warfare, Steve Goodman explores these uses of acoustic force and how they affect populations. Traversing philosophy, science, fiction, aesthetics, and popular culture, he maps a (dis)continuum of vibrational force, encompassing police and military research into acoustic means of crowd control, the corporate deployment of sonic branding, and the intense sonic encounters of sound art and music culture. Goodman concludes with speculations on the not yet heard—the concept of unsound, which relates to both the peripheries of auditory perception and the unactualized nexus of rhythms and frequencies within audible bandwidths.

Limited and hand-stamped collaborative publication between Séance Centre, BlackMass Publishing, and The Strangeness of Dub. Includes a published transcription, collaged booklet of poetry and images by Yusuf Hassan, and cassette. In April 2022, Brandon Hocura huddled in the Séance Centre inventory closet to block out traffic noise and recorded a three hour conversation with Edward George. The exchange was modelled on The Wire magazine’s Invisible Jukebox where artist’s improvise responses to a number of songs, drawing out themes, memories, and critical reflections from their sonic praxis. In this case, the discussion sprung from George’s lauded TheStrangeness of Dub series as well as his longstanding work with Black Audio Film Collective and Hallucinator (Chain Reaction).  From the introduction: “In the 1996 film The Last Angel of History Edward George plays the Data Thief, a sonic archaeologist who travels back in time in search of fragments of Black musical technologies that hold the keys to the future of mankind. In life, as in fiction, he is a theorist of vibration, reading the melodic codes and subaltern tales embedded in sound for clues about the past, present, and future. In The Strangeness of Dub, he uncovers and elevates the discourses encapsulated within dub music — he reads King Tubby, Burning Spear, Don Drummond, and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry alongside Foucault, Benjamin, and Derrida. In this capacious methodology of listening, knowledge is non-hierarchical and non-linear — Jah Shaka is as much a metaphysician as Wittgenstein.” Edward George is a writer and broadcaster. Founder of Black Audio Film Collective, George wrote and presented the ground-breaking science fiction documentary Last Angel of History (1996). George is part of the multimedia duo Flow Motion, and the electronic music group Hallucinator. He hosts Sound of Music (Threads Radio), Kuduro – Electronic Music of Angola (Counterflows). George’s series The Strangeness of Dub (Morley Radio) dives into reggae, dub, versions and versioning, drawing on critical theory, social history, and a deep and wide cross-genre musical selection. Edward George lives and works in London.