Blank Forms 07: The Cowboy’s Dreams of Home

‘The Cowboy’s Dreams of Home’, the seventh Blank Forms anthology, takes its name from a psychedelic Wild West reverie of Texan singer-songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen. This volume privileges new texts including a retrospective interview with Allen conducted by ICA Philadelphia chief curator Anthony Elms; a conversation between multidisciplinary writers—and longtime friends—Thulani Davis and Jessica Hagedornon 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, released by Blank Forms Editions last fall; 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 sheds 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.