Shouji Hara and Loren Connors

On the heels of Keiji Haino’s bombastic three-night run inaugurating Blank Forms’ new loft, Shouji Hara and Loren Connors offer an intimate performance at 151 Lafayette Street. Audiences are invited to gather at Blank Forms early in the evening to view the space and enjoy drinks; to close the night, Hara and Connors will perform together for the first time, improvising on shakuhachi and guitar, respectively.

Shouji Hara is a Berlin-based musician whose practice emphasizes making space for latent sonic phenomena, both in the room and in the listener’s body, to emerge. Rather than asserting a fixed composition, Hara responds to the inherent uncertainty and instability of sound, striving to relinquish his own presence in the work. 

Loren Connors, one of the world’s most singular guitarists, has been a fixture of Blank Forms’ programming since our very first concert, a rare showcase of his solo piano work. Prolific as a performer and recording artist, Connors has played on more than 100 releases across over four decades, honing a distinctive yet ever-evolving approach that has spanned his early takes on Delta bottleneck style, fragile song-based albums with Suzanne Langille, and the expansive, painterly abstraction that has defined his current style.