Ventoline #4 – mai 2022

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.

CSV Edition + CSV Edition (Extended Version)

Basic Mechanics is a hold-loose collection of words as findlings and carriers, that hold or lose meaning. Consequently, a description of this work will never simply come out of one’s mouth. The narrative will seem tied together with loose threads. As Ursula K. Le Guin writes in The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, we know the story of the hero with the spear and the violence and the teleological progression. But isn’t the story that can be told by all, one of carrying and being carried? Isn’t language a wrapping for all those contradictory and wondrous thoughts and feelings? And can they be captured on paper, for a while, and set free again to counterbalance the killer story?

Confessing secrets and desires to each other became a method of sharing. Accompanied by giggles, we somatically connected the stories we carry, which we (dare to) place with another, which move from the inside out. This publication spills, soaks, opens and closes to confessions, poems and drawings in looping motifs. A shell swimming in a sea of words.

Anita Di Bianco’s ongoing project, Corrections and Clarifications, is a newspaper without headlines, a cyclical reverse-chronology of daily revisions, retractions, re-wordings, distinctions and apologies to print and online news, printed in numerous languages, locations, and formats since September 2001. An intermittent catalog of lapses in naming and classification, of tangled catchphrases, obstinate patterns of mis-speech and inflection, connotation and enumeration. The twentieth anniversary hardbound edition of the publication, entitled The Error is Regretted, was published in 2021 by The Green Box in Berlin.

This 2024 iteration, in a xeroxed edition of 100, collects corrections to news items back to 1981 — with its focus on the Eastern Mediterranean region, on patterns of mis-telling and misrepresentation through the persistent misuse of the passive voice, the omission of widely observable and verifiable facts and events, the euphemizing and toning down of deliberate actions, erasures through shifts in terminologies, through bold mistakes and tentative corrections.

Anita Di Bianco’s works in film, video, and print take up, modify and re-work existing and re-imagined patterns and characterization. Her work involves the imitative act, a taste for the possession and expulsion of narratives, the appropriation and accumulation of familiar texts and writing styles. Anita uses widely varying sources: from theatrical and historical texts to oft-quoted cinematic clips and thematic references. She lives in Frankfurt am Main.

Speed Glum Hero. Read it as an instruction: Speed, Glum Hero. Read it as an assertion of life, like, keep living, go on. It takes this kind of serious play to make any sense of this moment we are living through. This is a pamphlet about subjectivity splintering, substance, and legend. This is a pamphlet about complicity, tenderness, and distress. This is a pamphlet about what it takes to stay gripping to the earth. The only way out is through.

D Mortimer is a writer and artist from London interested in the crip unknown. Their first book Last Night a Beef Jerk Saved My Life was published by Pilot Press in 2021. Mortimer is a Techne scholar in trans auto fictions at The University of Roehampton. Their work concerns technologies of madness and their doctoral project is entitled, Beef Journals: Naming the Uncertain in Transgender Subject Formation.