Originally published in Belgium by Oogachtend in 2007, then in the UK by Blank Slate Books in 2010 in a translation by Rhian Heppelstone, Sleepyheads is a nicely drawn – if somewhat goofy – graphic novel by an obviously talented creator.

Scroll down to the bottom of this page and click on the thumbnails to see a gallery of pages from this work (in the original language).  Nice, right?

FROM THE ARCHIVES

ONE NEW COPY

There is just so much interesting history here!  A packed volume of nearly 500 pages, filled with rare photographs and artworks of all sorts, Organic Music Societies does an amazing job of documenting the culture that cohered around Don & Moki Cherry in the roughly two decades – 1965 - 1985 – that they lived and worked together, producing Organic Music Theatre and much, much more, while following Moki Cherry's dictum, "The stage is home and home is a stage."

Here's what the publisher, Blank Forms, has to say about it:

Edited by Lawrence Kumpf with Naima Karlsson and Magnus Nygren. Introduction by Lawrence Kumpf and Magnus Nygren. Text by Keith Knox, Rita Knox, Bengt af Klintberg, Iris R. Orton, Åke Holmquist, Pandit Pran Nath, John Esam, Michael Lindfield, Sidsel Paaske, George Trolin, Alan Halkyard, Moki Cherry, Don Cherry, Ben Young, Christer Bothén, Ruba Katrib, and Fumi Okiji. Interviews by Keith Knox and Rita Knox with Don Cherry, Terry Riley, and Steve Roney.

Avant-garde jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and textile artist Moki Cherry (née Karlsson) met in Sweden in the late sixties. They began to live and perform together, dubbing their mix of communal art, social and environmentalist activism, children’s education, and pan-ethnic expression “Organic Music.” Organic Music Societies, Blank Forms’ sixth anthology, is a special issue released in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name devoted to the couple’s multimedia collaborations. The first English-language publication on either figure, the book highlights models for collectivism and pedagogy deployed in the Cherrys’ interpersonal and artistic work through the presentation of archival documents alongside newly translated and commissioned writings by musicians, scholars, and artists alike. 

Beginning with an overview by Blank Forms Artistic Director Lawrence Kumpf and Don Cherry biographer Magnus Nygren, this volume further explores Don’s work of the period through a piece on his Relativity Suite by Ben Young and an essay on the diasporic quality of his music by Fumi Okiji. Ruba Katrib emphasizes the domestic element of Moki’s practice in a biographical survey accompanied by full-color reproductions of Moki’s vivid tapestries, paintings, and sculptures, which were used as performance environments by Don’s ensembles during the Sweden years and beyond. Two selections of Moki’s unpublished writings—consisting of autobiography, observations, illustrations, and diary entries, as well as poetry and aphorisms—are framed by tributes from her daughter Neneh Cherry and granddaughter Naima Karlsson. Swedish Cherry collaborator Christer Bothén contributes period travelogues from Morocco, Mali, and New York, providing insight into the cross-cultural communication that would soon come to be called “world music.” 

The collection also features several previously unpublished interviews with Don, conducted by Christopher R. Brewster and Keith Knox. A regular visitor to the Cherry schoolhouse in rural Sweden, Knox documented the family’s magnetic milieu in his until-now unpublished Tågarp Publication. Reproduced here in its entirety, the journal includes an interview with Terry Riley, an essay on Pandit Pran Nath, and reports on counter-cultural education programs in Stockholm, including the Bombay Free School and the esoteric Forest University.

Taken together, the texts, artwork, and abundant photographs collected in Organic Music Societiesshine a long overdue spotlight on Don and Moki’s prescient and collaborative experiments in the art of living.

6 x 8 inches, 496 pages. 138 Color and 86 B&W images

Blank Forms sez, "In this captivating memoir, the first full-length narrative of life in the Arkestra by any of its members, Harlem-born trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah recounts two decades of traveling the spaceways with the inimitable composer, pianist and big-band leader, Sun Ra."

536 pages; including 64 pages of photographs.

This 400+ page book is entirely devoted to the early electronic work of French composer Éliane Radigue.  It is, evidently (and sadly), the "final anthology" volume from Blank Forms.  It came out last summer, but we were late to the party – but, for anyone with an interest in Radigue, better late than never!

Here's the publisher description:

The tenth and final anthology from Blank Forms 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, 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 synthesizer work Trilogie de la Mort (1988–93) 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.”