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.
NVA asked Arika to curate and programme the sound aspects of their 2007 Half-Life production in Kilmartin Glen. Arika worked with Toshiya Tsunoda, Lee Patterson, Rhodri Davies and Angharad Davies.
Koji Asano, Japanese composer and sound-artist performing slow groaning burbling tones, moaning echoes and drones.
A conversation about the movement for prison abolition and refusing the logic of race and sex that underpins the criminalisation and mass incarceration of communities.
The Tower performance at KYTN throws into that mix the 70’s fluxus light shows and films of Jeff Perkins and other filmic interventions tuned to their unique frequency.
An contradictory guitarist, he’s equally at home in slow, halting acoustic improvisation or piercing minimal examinations of electric guitar.
One of the most startling cinematic debuts on record, The Flicker is more a hallucination than a film, an out of body experience and riotous celebration of visual harmonics frequencies. An experiment in perception, come with your mind and eyes open.
The pieces in the programme switch between silent film/ imageless sound, but we wanted to have a think about how ideas can take up residency on either side of the sound/ image border, without having to inhabit both at the same time.
Bleu Shut reveals, and allows us to enjoy, our gullibility within the pervasive absurdity of modern life.
A sung-through Nubian musical ballet. A darkly humorous take on sexual trauma and what magical and ancestral tools might heal it.
Sparse and miniature free thought workouts involving guitar, vocals and tuba.
A speculative narrative film informed by poetry and theories of quantum entanglement across diasporic distance. An intimate exploration of grief and resistance in shifting landscapes of loss, from the streets to the bed.