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.
A performed film lecture exploring how the ‘Rumberas’ of Caribbean cinema of the 40’s and 50’s subverted demeaning images of themselves through dance, sound and a sociality that insisted on blackness as being a cultural performance, not simply due to skin colour.
Four intimate 45 minute sessions, readings of your political questions – using Tarot, Palmistry, Reiki, Astrology, and Philosophy, and the invented methods of Fake and Political Therapy.
What kind of listening and acknowledging do we offer each other? What is it to listen to an ‘elsewhere’, and do we ever do anything else when we listen to music?
Brother and sister stumble over the early morning horizon in a spectral haze of emotionally devastating lunar vocals and oblique, lithium-soaked folk.
Torrential, wrenching wordless wails, guttural screams and roars, a Haino solo vocal performance.
Ecstatic, intensely joyous experimental club music: like “the sound of our water ceremonies…40 bands playing their melodies at once to recreate the cacophony of the first aurora and the call of the morning star Venus”.
A meditation on how all of us perform — sometimes reinforcing, sometimes subverting — the shifting categories of gender, sexuality and race.
A panel exploring how to dismantle the master’s house — its material edifices and ideological architecture — and the construction of abolitionist futures in the present.
Could cruising and random public sex be the basis of an ethically organised society? A discussion with Jackie Wang, Samuel R. Delany and Huw Lemmey.
A crash-course in pre-figurative, radical, queer, anti-racist, anti-police, anti-prison, anti-deportation abolitionist politics and trans-resistance.
Do almost nothing: re-present (unaltered and arranged by chance) silent family home movies handed down to Flo, (Ken’s wife) and follow them with a “teach yourself Yiddish” cassette tape.