Blank Forms Editions Vinilo y CD

Notes: Conversations with the avant-garde's leading lights--from Suicide to Anohni -- by experimental music's go-to interviewer, guitarist and sound artist Alan Licht. For the past 30 years, Alan Licht has been a performer, programmer and chronicler of New York's art and music scenes. His dry wit, deep erudition and unique perspective -- informed by decades of experience as a touring and recording guitarist in the worlds of experimental music and underground rock -- have distinguished him as the go-to writer for profiles of adventurous artists across genres. A precocious scholar and improvisor, by the time he graduated from Vassar College in 1990 Licht had already authored important articles on minimalist composers La Monte Young, Tony Conrad and Charlemagne Palestine, and recorded with luminaries such as Rashied Ali and Thurston Moore. In 1999 he became a regular contributor to the British experimental music magazine the Wire while continuing to publish in a wide array of periodicals, ranging from the artworld glossies to underground fanzines. Common Tones gathers a selection of never-before-published interviews, many conducted during the writing of Licht's groundbreaking profiles, alongside extended versions of his celebrated conversations with artists, previously untranscribed public exchanges and new dialogues held on the occasion of this collection. Even Lou Reed, a notoriously difficult interviewee, was impressed. Interviews by Alan Licht with Vito Acconci, ANOHNI, Cory Arcangel, Matthew Barney, Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, Tony Conrad, the Dream Syndicate's Karl Precoda, Richard Foreman, Henry Flynt, Milford Graves, Adris Hoyos, Ken Jacobs, Jutta Koether, Christian Marclay, Phill Niblock, Alessandra Novaga, Tony Oursler, Lou Reed, Kelly Reichardt, The Sea and Cake, Suicide, Michael Snow, Greg Tate, Tom Verlaine, Rudy Wurlitzer and Yo La Tengo's Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan. Introduction by Jay Sanders.

Review: Captured on this record is the first ever performance from Organic Music Theatre, which was a collaboration between American trumpet player and free jazz pioneer Don Cherry and Swedish visual artist and designer Moki Cherry. It was performed at the 1972 Festival de jazz de Chateauvallon in the south of France and has been remastered from the organ tapes used during the live TV Broadcast. It marked the start of Don become a mystic figure and shining his legacy as a jazz great and is filled with spiritual jazz sounds, organic percussion, and because it was performed in an outdoor amphitheatre, the sounds of dozens of adults and children are also on the recording.

Review: Shadow Ring frontman Graham Lambkin recorded most of the music on Aphorisms during the start of the winter time back in 2022. He did so across locations in post-pandemic New York and post-Brexit London and in doing so captures the sound of daily life and reworking it into haunting and intimate soundscapes. It is his first real album in some seven-odd years and serves as an extended "transatlantic meditation" that focuses on processing that move back to the UK after almost 20 years living stateside. It's fragile and hypnotic and beautiful and another great work from this modern maestro.

Review: Shadow Ring were an enigmatic force throughout the decade of their existence. They operated on the international musical underground and had a shambolic post-rock sound that reflect the rag-bag group of rowdy teenagers who made it. The self-released pre-Shadow Ring tape The Cat & Bells Club came in 1992 and is getting its first ever vinyl pressing, as is the group's sophomore record Put the Music In Its Coffin. It is a more dark and sinister album that collides low-fidelity rock, noise, gauzy guitars and plenty of grit and sleaze. It has a dark and unsettling ambiance throughout and remains a truly unique record.

Review: Kazuki Tomokawa is one of the most enigmatic figures in Japan's modern musical history. Not only a poet and a singer, he's also a bicycle race commentator and a self-described vagabond, and in the 70s he set his poems to music as Japan enjoyed something of a folk music boom. It was 1975 when he recorded his first album, in particular teaming up with percussionist Toshiaki Ishizuka for a fruitful musical partnership. Blank Forms has been diligently reissuing much of Tomokawa's music, and now they're turning their attention to this deluxe three CD boxed set comprised of Finally, His First Album, Straight from the Throat, and A String of Paper Cranes Clenched between My Teeth.