
Music Lover’s Field Companion 05
Taking our festivals south of the border to The Sage Gateshead we set out to offer a few cardinal pointers in the vast array of experimental music practices.
Arika have been creating events since 2001. The Archive is space to share the documentation of our work, over 600 events from the past 20 years. Browse the archive by event, artists and collections, explore using theme pairs, or use the index for a comprehensive overview.
Taking our festivals south of the border to The Sage Gateshead we set out to offer a few cardinal pointers in the vast array of experimental music practices.
From really simple, open instructions, An Unrhymed Chord creates a kind of half-way point between composition and improvisation.
Two-parts Helhesten spit strangled shanties and cracked reeds from under a net of the Glasgow Improv Orchestra’s six-strings and one moustache.
An extravagant debauch of plush toys and ritual. Palestine performed a version of Strumming Music, a trance inducing investigation into overtone systems achievable on a Bosendorfer Imperial Piano.
A drone installation populated by flourescent strip lights working in complicity with analogue radios – “all the lights just do their thing”.
In Ramayya’s visionary poetry, the body assumes as many forms as love produces states: attraction and repulsion, excitement and exhaustion, selfishness and the dissolution of self.
Dub is strange. A conversation with Edward George and Dhanveer Brar.
How do poetry and maths stitch together pictures of our fractured situation from its wreckage and relics, from the debris of hope and the well of residues that make us what we are?
A dismantled, performed film, where a narrator pieces together the sounds, images and storytelling of a documentary about Hurricane Katrina before a live audience.
How might two of the great musicians working within contrasting traditions of freedom collaborate? What might this produce: musically, socially, allegorically?
A delicate and detailed walk through the urban and rural landscape around Dundee; a poetic focus on the details found. A performance for 16mm projection and live amplified objects (maybe pine cones, maybe a coke bottle).
A double bill of A (imageless) film of nothing but a sound recording and its transcription and a found film of news interviews about Malcolm X’s assasination, where the filmmaker decided to add nothing to it, except our attention.