Blank Forms #05 – Aspirations of Madness

The tenth and final anthology from Blank Forms offers an exceptional insight into the work, working methods and thinking of the French pioneer of musique concrète and electroacoustic composition Éliane Radigue, through key texts, a wealth of archival documents (including correspondence, notes and sketches for works, concert flyers, photographs, drawings, reviews, etc.), in-depth interviews and commissioned essays.

This volume explores the early electronic work of French composer Éliane Radigue, whose radical approach to feedback, analog synthesis, and composition on tape has long evaded historical and technical interpretation. Combining key texts, newly translated primary documents, in-depth interviews, and commissioned essays, this compendium interrogates the composer's idiosyncratic compositional practice, which both embraces and confounds the iterative nature of magnetic tape, the subtleties of amplification, and the very experience of listening.

Among these entries is an in-depth overview by cellist Charles Curtis, a close collaborator of Radigue's, examining the composer's earliest experiments with feedback techniques and analog synthesis, her eventual shift to composing for unamplified instruments and live performers, and her unique aesthetic configurations of time and presence. A number of detailed conversations between the composer and researchers Georges Haessig, Patrick de Haas, Ian Nagoski, and Bernard Girard provide crucial insights into her working methods at different points throughout her career. Religious studies scholar Dagmar Schwerk reflects upon Radigue's profound 1988 synthesizer work, Kyema, in the context of Tibetan Buddhist thought and its history, while texts by musicians Daniel Silliman and Madison Greenstone examine, in notably different ways, the technical characteristics of Radigue's sound practice. Sketches for unrealized work, contemporary reviews, concert programs, and other ephemera mapping the performance history of Radigue's early work are presented together for the first time. The anthology concludes with a roundtable discussion between Curtis, Greenstone and Anthony Vine, untangling the knot of paradoxes at the center of Radigue's artistic practice to trace the thread of her continued "ethos of resistance."

Edited by Lawrence Kumpf and Charles Curtis.
Texts by Éliane Radigue, Charles Curtis, Georges Haessig, Patrick de Haas, Ian Nagoski, Bernard Girard, Dagmar Schwerk, Daniel Sillman, Madison Greenstone, Anthony Vine.

Blank Forms' journal brings together a combination of never-before published, lost, and new materials that supplement Blank Forms' live programs. It is envisioned as a platform for critical reflection and extended dialogue between scholars, artists, and other figures working within the world of experimental music and art.

Éliane Radigue (born 1932 in Paris) is considered one of the most innovative and influential contemporary composers, from her early electronic music through to her acoustic work of the last fifteen years. Influenced by musique concrète and shaped by regular sojourns in the United States, where she discovered analogue synthesisers, her work unfolds an intensity which is at once subtle and monumental. Through her deep reflections on sound and listening, not only her music but also her working methods have come to shape a widely resonating set of new parameters for working with sound as musical material.

Though his years in the New York free-jazz scene of the sixties cemented his reputation as "one of the most forceful and convincing composers and soloists in his field," saxophonist Sonny Simmons (1933–2021) was nearly forgotten by the '80s, which found him broke, heavily dependent on drugs and alcohol, and separated from his wife and kids. "I played on the streets from 1980 to 1994, 365 days a year," Simmons tells jazz historian and biographer Marc Chaloin. "I would go to North Beach, and I'd sleep in the park. The word got around town that Sonny is a junkie, really strung out."

The resurrection of Simmons' career―upon the release of his critically acclaimed Ancient Ritual (Qwest Records) in 1994―has become a modern legend of the genre. In the last two decades of his musical career, Simmons broke through to a new echelon of recognition, joining the pantheon of great innovators and masters of the music. But to this day he remains an undersung figure. Here, in the first ever book dedicated to his life, Simmons recounts his childhood in the backwoods of Louisiana, his adolescence in the burgeoning Bay Area jazz scene and his star-studded life in New York playing alongside the greats.

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

Had it been produced, Maryanne Amacher's media opera Intelligent Life would have represented the summation of the composer's concept to date. As she wrote to John Cage in the autumn of 1983, following the untimely deaths of the opera's patrons—Wies Smals, founder of De Appel, and curator Josine van Droffelaar, in a plane crash in the Swiss Alps—she would have at last had the support to "communicate the finest of my thought to others." Amacher's serial, intended for broadcast, sought to transmit her evolving ideas about perception, listening, and composition to a broader public—shifting music away from "nod and tap recognition" toward a transformative practice that could awaken intelligence to "unrecognized and new perceptual modes."

Set in the year 2021, Intelligent Life follows the employees of Supreme Connections LLC, a music entertainment corporation navigating a future in which artificial intelligence generates music faster than composers can. Anticipating an industry-wide downturn, Supreme Connections president Aplisa Kandel seeks advanced technologies that will revolutionize the act of listening and the future of music, including a bio-music script that lets the user hear Bach from the aural perspective of a reindeer and a wearable device that goes beyond replicating the mechanical tympanic resonances of the listening subject to produce the "listening mind" or the "sophisticated perceiver"—capturing and reproducing all the emotional and psychological associations unique to each individual.
Though Amacher could not realize Intelligent Life in any of its intended forms—she theorized its publication as a serialized radio broadcast and television simulcast, among other configurations—she continued designing "treatments" for the opera for much of her career. This volume makes the most complete of these working documents—including episodic scripts, notes on the use of LaserDisc, and an illustrated storyboard for the pilot—available to the public for the first time.

Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009) was a composer of large-scale fixed-duration sound installations and a highly original thinker in the areas of perception, sound spatialization, creative intelligence, and aural architecture. She is frequently cited as a pioneer of what has come to be called “sound art,” although her thought and creative practice consistently challenges key assumptions about the capacities and limitations of that genre. Often considered to be a part of a post-Cagean lineage, her work anticipates some of the most important developments in network culture, media arts, acoustic ecology, and sound studies.

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

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

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

Kenneth Gaburo (1926-1993) is renowned as a teacher, pioneer of electronics in music, jazz pianist, writer, ecologist, publisher, and proponent of compositional linguistics. Over the course of a dedicated career, his uncompromising work carved out its own patch in the territory of American experimentalism.

Lingua Press, 1976

James Kirtland Randall (1929 - ) was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music from 1934 to 1947, and subsequently attended Columbia University (B.A., 1955), Harvard (M.A., 1956) and Princeton (M.F.A., 1958). He studied piano with Leonard Shure and composition with Herbert Elwell, Thad Jones, Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt. From 1958 to 1991 he taught at Princeton, where he was professor of music. He was a founding member of the American Society of University Composers and has written articles on composing and music theory for several journals, notably Perspectives of New Music (some of these were collected in the monograph Compose Yourself: A Manual for the Young (Open Space, 1995)). He also collaborated with Benjamin Boretz on the book Being About Music: Textworks 1960-2003 (Open Space, 2003).

From the early 1960s into the 1970s, Randall engaged principally in computer synthesis of sound and, with Godfrey Winham, developed facilities for this at Princeton University. His tape compositions were generated by the MUSIC IV B program, a version of MUSIC IV introduced at Princeton. He designed his own software "instruments," which enabled him to specify every aspect of every sound and structure developments within single notes in ways that reflect principles of development used in whole compositions as, for example in Lyric Variations for Violin and Computer (1966-1968).

In 1980 he turned his attention to improvised musical performance and began a series of explorations of spontaneous group performance, or "real-time co-creation," involving many kinds of musicians and other artists (painters, dancers) as well. The ongoing efforts, preserved on hundreds of sound recordings and videotapes (under the project name Inter/Play), document the emergence of idiosyncratic group styles and performing conventions. Randall is himself a regular participant in these performances. In 1990, Randall, along with Elaine Barkin and Benjamin Boretz, started the publications series Open Space.

Là is an immersive, politically charged sound journey – a lament for the Al Naqab desert in Palestine. It is the result of a collaboration between Sirah Foighel Brutmann, Eitan Efrat, Laszlo Umbreit, and Ot Lemmens. The album combines acoustic instruments like flute and cymbals with processed electronics and mechanical sounds. 

The track Ensemble is made from sound recordings of eleven 16mm film projectors, playing simultaneously and in intervals, creating a texture centered around a single pitch – La/A. 

The tracks For Her, There, and No are recordings of live sessions played by Laszlo Umbreit and Eitan Efrat.  

The album also features an extended text by Rose Higham-Stainton titled Strategies for Survival, spread across a 12-page booklet.

This book is for people who love electronic music, people who probably have a synthesizer or two at home. It’s for people who tell themselves that they should find some time for their passion, who blame themselves for not making enough music. This book is for them.

For decades, I thought that I could be a music producer. But over the years, I have discovered that my contribution to the electronic scene wasn’t exactly the music itself. Although I was lucky enough to produce a few successful tracks in Lithuania, back in the ‘90s, my actual achievement turned out to be raising interest in electronic music, for other young people. I’m still surprised when someone remembers my old tracks, but I’m very proud when someone tells me that listening to me speak on the radio about Berlin techno changed their dreams back in the day. Later, in the 2000s, I was part of the early SoundCloud team. The code we wrote has touched hundreds of millions people around the world. No track or song I would have ever produced would have had such an effect. There is a reason that Brian Eno says the evolution of music is moved by technology as much as it is by artists. The people who created Logic and Ableton, those who code SoundCloud and Spotify, design Korg and Roland synths, they influence the course of music on a massive scale. The development of music technology is the work of many people and I’m happy to call myself one of that gang.

This book is a natural extension of those ideas. It’s not based on scientific or journalistic research, but it’s not a biography, either. I imagine this book sitting on a studio desk, or in a gig bag. In the process, I hope that some young music creators will find answers here, and inspirations, to the questions they’ve been wrestling with for a long time.