Listener as Operator
Howard Slater
Our favourite Lancashire-born autodictact asks what’s political about the tension between the individual and the collective in free jazz.
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.
Our favourite Lancashire-born autodictact asks what’s political about the tension between the individual and the collective in free jazz.
The first INSTAL festival (programmed by Barry Esson of Arika and Tiernan Kelly) featured a line-up including Robert Lippock, Philip Jeck, Fennesz, Paragon Ensemble, Icebreaker International, Defaalt and Rhomboi.
Sonic ‘observations’ of the world, through micro recordings on a tiny scale and transformed into something musically compelling.
A system in which oscillators shake The Arches, seismographs pick up the harmonics that are then amplified through massive sub-bass PA.
“The miracle of Herman Melville is this: that a hundred years ago in Moby Dick…he painted a picture of the world in which we live, which is to this day unsurpassed.” – C. L. R. James
Minimal details and otherworldly glistening drones, rich with sustained metallic timbres that breathe with the scrapped pulse of bowed metal.
Reading their letters to each other, and chatting about prefigurative politics as the practice of relentlessly building worlds through unspeakable violence and loss; of building worlds and living in them anyway.
Jarrod Fowler creates a social space where layered one-to-one live encounters with the audience become sonic material.
Deliberately blurred drones, absent of definite structure or rhythm, framed in silence and devoid of any distraction from the pure matter of sound.
Music is full of refracted brass and wind tones, distorted tape loops, dead silent air and the occasional piercing shard of sound.
The first performative part in a game of chance and endurance as actor Tam Dean Burn constantly broadcasts for 24hrs.
Reveling in the geometric, mathematical and perceptual relationship between sound and form, this programme features a landmark work of experimental film in Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer; a complex, enduring and expressive of structuralist or flicker films.