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.
Where we join Nackt Insecten’s disembodied spectral howls and heavyweight locomotive drones about SPT’s Subway.
‘Ten Pieces in the Form of Painful Variations’ for piano, an impossible score that looks like a grapeshot musical stave, a text of barbed loathing and doubt – an anti-composition.
To Rococo Rot member Robert Lippok performing for the first time in the UK with his solo project.
The struggle for sex workers’ rights and how we can understand it in the continuum of care work and other forms of invisibilised and precarious work.
Looking at and listening to different ideas about sound and music, INSTAL 09’s collection of artists included Tetsuo Kogawa, vocalist Joan La Barbara, Phil Minton (and his Century FC feral choir), Austrian Actionist Hermann Nitsch, Steve McCaffery and many more.
Performing with hand built radio transmitters, which react to interference in the atmosphere and the electrical impedance of his hands, his radio art is a form of social practice; a statement in opposition to mass media.
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”.
How can we imagine bodies not as an end in themselves, but as a medium through which we can become one another’s means?
Paul Sharits’ Shutter Interface is a multi screen installation born of an intent to reveal the material substance of cinema in its purest form: spatially.
Everyday objects and materials (rubber bands, paper, a sink, microphones) disabused of their inertia and made to speak for themselves in a kind of focusing in on the tiny, repetitive, almost unobserved (sonic/ visual) potential of everyday things put into motion.
Sachiko M and Ami Yoshida, two of the most prominent members of the Onkyo movement, place much more emphasis on sound texture than on musical structure, distilling elements of techno, noise, and electronic music into a unique hybrid.