The Fluid Computer

A manuscript shortlisted for the inaugural edition of the Prototype Prize, 2024, a eulogy to the sonic influence and cultural inferences of the sound of the cicada. A train of thought on the multiform significations and significance of the cicada’s buzz and hum; a dissection and deconstruction of the insect as emblem; a wild and associative suite of fragments on the evocations of background noise when brought to the fore.

Milo Thesiger Meacham’s Audible Heat is a rich, meditative ecotone of ideas; a nimble and associative work of essayism that aims to map a reticulated cultural biography of the sound of the cicada. Equal parts academic argument, travelogue, and critical collage, this synthesis of ideas pulls upon a wide-ranging bibliography of materials to examine the omnipresent sound of the cicada as ‘audible heat’ throughout human history and culture. Herein, this climatic sound acts as a conduit between ecology, identity and mortality, and the cicada’s sonic inference emerges as a codification of the unknown and unfamiliar—as a spiritual weathervane in desert settings—and as a means of teasing out the sensorial limits of human understanding.

Thesiger-Meacham sits himself in a field of enquiry and in dialogue with voices various, ancient, and modern, such as Douglas Yanega of the University of California, folk musician Matthias Loibner, and Gene Kritsky, developer of Cicada Safari, a public app which tracks the mass emergence of periodical cicadas across North America, in a transversal network of interlinked, informational nodes.

Herein, we’ve the sonic-induced anxieties of 17th, 18th and 19th-century colonists in Northeastern America—notably the largely unknown career of entomologist Margaretta Morris—and the apocalyptic premonitions of the indigenous Wampanoag; Greek tongue twisters; the poetry of Ibn Quzmān and Harry Crosby; African American mathematician Benjamin Banneker’s lost wooden clock; Socrates' fear of dehydration; the geopolitical tensions embedded in Southern Spain as Al-Andalus (سُلَدْنَألا); Plato’s Phaedrus; a history of the hurdy-gurdy; Geronimo’s hatred of telegraphy; contemporary and historical entomologies; the slurred, slow body language of Clint Eastwood; insects on the film sets of Sergio Leone's Spanish Westerns; squinting; tanning; metamorphosis; acts of violence in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968); military reenactments of the Battle of Marathon (490 BCE); the botanist Donald C. Peattie’s existential dread; ancient cooking implements; riverside trees hills, and their symmetric reflections in still water…

All ideas emanating from the acoustical atmospherics inherent to the cicada’s song.

The seventh entry in an ongoing series of anthologies, this book features rare poems alongside new essays and interviews that engage the artists and themes explored elsewhere in Blank Forms' public programming.

Where most of prior entries, including Aspirations of Madness (2020), Intelligent Life (2019), and Music From The World Tomorrow (2018), have foregrounded little-seen or newly translated archival materials, this iteration privileges new texts produced specifically for the publication. These include an in-depth retrospective interview with the idiosyncratic Texan singer-songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen conducted by ICA Philadelphia chief curator Anthony Elms; a conversation between multidisciplinary writers—and longtime friends—Thulani Davis and Jessica Hagedorn on the occasion of Davis's latest poetry collection, Nothing but the Music, recently published by Blank Forms Editions; a recent discussion between composer Sarah Hennies and cellist Judith Hamann about their recent collaboration, which is included on Hamann's Music for Cello and Humming; and a conversation with composer-performers Tashi Wada and Charles Curtis, on the heels of a recent compilation of Curtis's work, Performances & Recordings 1998– 2018, produced by Wada. Each of these interviews shed light on the particularities of the artists' careers and methods in terms both formal and casual, practical and theoretical. 

In addition to these dialogues, this book features new critical reflections on three artists whose work Blank Forms has presented: the legendary jazz percussionist and healer Milford Graves, by Ciarán Finlayson; English multimedia artist Graham Lambkin and his beguiling 2011 album Amateur Doubles, by Alan Licht; and the UK-based experimental music trio Still House Plants, by Joe Bucciero. These articles mine historical, social, and theoretical contexts, filling gaps in the existing literature on the given artist-subjects. New and archival poems and writing about poetry complement these interviews and essays, including rare texts by Davis, Hagedorn, and René Daumal—the latter translated by Louise Landes Levi—and a suite of Auto-Mythological writings commissioned from Chicago-based composer and musician Angel Bat Dawid.

For Clipping I: Coming of Age, editors Federica Notari and Natasha Rijkhoff compiled fragments from the events and gatherings held during the ongoing two-year collaboration between the Nieuwe Instituut’s Through Sounds project and the Rewire Festival. This co-curated, two-part programme explored the social and affective infrastructures of sound and music.

The theme of Coming of Age emerged from a desire to explore processes of becoming, not as a single transition, but as an ongoing iterative state. In this context, music acts as a connective tissue, bridging isolated experiences and communal infrastructures to form networks of shared meaning and distribution. Tracks become social objects: they carry stories, spark interactions and transform spaces.

The publication features written contributions by Emily Moore, Federica Notari, Katía Truijen and Natasha Rijkhoff. It is edited by Federica Notari and Natasha Rijkhoff, designed by Catherine Hu and Cleo Tsw, and printed and bound by No Kiss.

Two Intersecting Loops of Silence is a 10-inch experimental vinyl that turns silence into rhythm and time into matter. Side A features two silent grooves that create a mechanical ticking when played, while Side B animates a clock-like etched drawing as the record spins. Numbered edition of 200 with hand-printed, unique etching covers. Each copy a one-of-a-kind artwork.

An account of an album about Albania by British experimental musicians made in the eighties. Also involving stories about the Albanian Society, William Bland, A. L. lloyd, RCPB ML, and Cornelius Cardew.

From Scratch is a story of Albanian Summer: An Entertainment, an LP album released by Practical Music in London in 1984. The album was composed by Dave Smith—English experimental composer and musician, figure of the British minimalist scene, explorer of Javanese and Albanian musical traditions with the English Gamelan Orchestra and Liria which he co-founded, and a member of The Scratch Orchestra (with Brian Eno, Cornelius Cardew, John Tilbury, Keith Rowe, Michael Nyman, Michael Parsons, etc.)—, and performed by Janet Sherbourne and Jan Steele, improvised and classical musicians.

Through interviews, archival materials, and hard-to-find essays the publication contextualizes the background of British experimental musicians' interest in socialist Albania. It includes new interviews with Dave Smith and Jan Steele, three essays by Smith on Albanian music and culture, an essay by Gavin Bryars on Smith's music, discussions on the influence of A.L. Lloyd and Cornelius Cardew, and the role of the Albanian Society in the UK. The book introduces new insight into the leftist internationalist background of British experimental music influenced by the work of Cardew. 

Apart from the musical internationalism, the book also includes a section of nine abstract slogans depicting the political and artistic contradictions of socialist Albania; annotated bibliography of books published in different languages on Albania; the collection of images taken from the biweekly Zëri i Rinisë (The Voice of Youth) published in 1984 and 1985.