Talk by Alan Cummings: A personal history of the Japanese Underground
Alan Cummings
Talk charting the radical history of experimental music in Japan + the lowdown into the careers of many of the artists appearing at MLFC.
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.
Talk charting the radical history of experimental music in Japan + the lowdown into the careers of many of the artists appearing at MLFC.
Work that focuses in on the static hiss and background noise of recording and pushes it to the fore.
MICRO 1 – Wrap a live microphone with a very large sheet of paper. Make a light bundle. Keep the microphone live for another 5 minutes. T. Kosugi – (1961)
How do communities practice being one another’s means, addressing their material problems facing them replicating the state’s violent logic of who is disposable.
Conceived of as a dual publication, video cassette and booklet, to be presented as an installation. The content of the videotape is the artist watching television.
How do grassroots feminist organisations strategise relationships between mothers, parents, carers and their children based on respect and empowerment, in resistance to the practice of putting children in often the most uncaring of places – care.
A solo improvisation using just the situation of the concert: a space, a PA, Mattin’s own thoughts, you, the audience.
The site of the former Abbeyhill Station on the 1903 Leith branch of the Edinburgh and Dalkeith railway, overgrown and leading to as yet un-regenerated ‘wasteland’; taxi’s for 80 people, each instructed to take different routes between locations and; a slice of land concealed behind corporate business park branding off the Wester Approach Rd, apparently of no conceivable use and named ‘Chateaux de Scum’ by those who use it anyway.
How can we imagine bodies not as an end in themselves, but as a medium through which we can become one another’s means?
Sarah Washington uses electronics and wind-up radios, running out of charge to repsond to the festivals’ Self Cancellation provocation.
A celebration of our overabundant social entanglement and complicity, that remind us of how we can see ourselves, stripped of powers’ attempts to grasp us.