Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages
Mirror Phantom Engineer
Mirror and Phantom Engineer performing an improvised soundtrack to Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 horror film prototype, Haxan: Witchcraft through the Ages.
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.
Mirror and Phantom Engineer performing an improvised soundtrack to Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 horror film prototype, Haxan: Witchcraft through the Ages.
A saxophone. Handheld fans. Shrill squeaks. Splutters, gargling. An incredible diversity of sounds, intensely focused by an inventive musician.
Three workshops lead up to an open invitation to improvise with the festival as concert. The last four hours of the Sunday 14 at Instal 10 were devoted to presentations devised during the three workshops. The material conditions (time, space, facilities…) were the instruments. From there anything could happen.
Guitar solo where inscrutable, minute electric sounds are excavated by palms that smother and strangle, that wring sound from the fretboard, from behind the bridge.
In 2008 we toured our Kill Your Timid Notion festival of experimental sound and image to London, Bristol and Glasgow, bringing audiences a taste of the previous 5 festival editions.
An open conversation hosted by Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten around ‘fugitivity’ and ‘waywardness’ and what it means to be in flight, excessive or ungovernable.
First live show outside the USA featuring one-off film pieces and live theatre from the ringleaders of the ‘weird new America’ psych folk explosion.
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.
Seven women recite monologues composed from texts from the vibrant years of the Weimar Republic. A kind of cultural echo: an experience of histories brought to the present.
A cast of pioneering and provocative spirits who exist outside the mainstream, between borders and definitions; a series of events that each explore different aspects of music that doesn’t quite fit any given category. INSTAL 08 included the Self-Cancellation project.
This set continues on from the Bud Neill inspired clatter using the contents of the Usurper twin’s pockets.
Michael Colligan pressing white hot metal into dry ice, causing the metal to sing and scream.