*Comes in heavy gatefold sleeve* Having already unearthed three collections of archival 1970s recordings by Catherine Christer Hennix, Blank Forms continues our annual illumination of the visionary Swedish composer's music by turning to more recent work with this first-time vinyl edition of Hennix's Blues Alif Lam Mim in the Mode of Rag Infinity/Rag Cosmosis, a 2014 piece first released as a CD in 2016. The double album captures the April 22, 2014 premiere of the composition by the Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage, Hennix's expanded just intonation ensemble, featuring a brass section of Amir ElSaffar, Paul Schwingenschl?gl, Hilary Jeffery, Elena Kakaliagou, and Robin Hayward; live electronics by Stefan Tiedje and Marcus Pal; and voice by Amirtha Kidambi, Imam Ahmet Muhsin T?zer, and Hennix herself. Intended to reveal the origins of the blues in the Eastern musical traditions of raga and makam, Blues Alif Lam Mim in the Mode of Rag Infinity/Rag Cosmosis has its roots in Hennix's 2013 realization of an "Illuminatory Sound Environment," a concept developed in 1978 by anti-artist Henry Flynt on the basis of Hennix's own "The Electric Harpsichord." As Hennix explains in Other Matters, Blank Forms' 2019 collection of her writings: Rag Infinity/Rag Cosmosis presents fragments of 'raga-like' frequency constellations following distinct cycles and permuting their order, creating a simultaneity of 'multi-universes.' When two such 'universes' come in proximity of each other and begin unfolding simultaneously along distinct cycles, there is a kaleidoscopic exfoliation of frequencies as one universe is becoming two, but not separated-the effect of cosmosis is entrained, binding two or more frequency universes into proximity where their modal properties interact and blend, creating in the process entirely new microtonal constellations in an omnidirectional simultaneous cosmic order with phenomenologically 'transfinite' Poincar? cycles (cyclic returns to initial conditions). As with Hennix's best work, the organic unfol...
