
Merzbow
Merzbow takes the junk of sound and transforms it into blistering noise assaults with an incredible spectrum and impact.
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.
Merzbow takes the junk of sound and transforms it into blistering noise assaults with an incredible spectrum and impact.
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.
Dual projections of pulsating shards of film, treated in crystallized salts and dyes merge with the whirring of projectors, distilled into particles of sound.
Patented 60 cycle hums, static pops, and terse electron pinpricks mutated into perfect, post-techno grooves and synaesthesic video
Voguing, drag, clubbing, and the politics of communities making different performances of gender and sexuality visible.
Relative patterns of occlusion and exposure occupy two screens. Each exposure fires a stroboscopic flash of colour: yellow for one screen; blue for the other, filling the centre of both screens with colour, haloed with after-images.
Elizabeth’s writing pulls apart toxic settler colonialism and the worldview used to justify it; working towards an alternative distribution of powers, so that ways of being otherwise can endure.
Each of these films addresses place, landscape or location and the personal reaction to their magical or concrete properties. Watch out for Kren’s structural, throbbing investigation of a forest and Baillie’s intimate and humble essay on a blind guitarist and the relationship between songs of Mexican revolutionaries and the people and places they looked to inspire.
Goodwin’s writing emanates from the social life of poetry, from a condition of entanglement before historically racially-specific forms of representation. Another word for this emanation is breath.
Beat poet Ira Cohen’s now infamous and wildly psychedelic film odyssey feeds one’s own seeing apparatus through beautifully warped and distorting mylar mirrors, resulting in a film dense and rich with visual arcana and poetry.
Can we use sound, repetition and difference to personally and collectively engage with space, time and labour?
Writing that shows us that, even in struggle, there is light to be let in.