John Wall
John Wall
Tiny fragments of sound recombined and woven into spare and precise, violent yet beautiful pieces
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.
Tiny fragments of sound recombined and woven into spare and precise, violent yet beautiful pieces
 
What does it mean to listen with the mind as well as the ears? A solo performance from the great avant-garde pianist.
 
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.
 
Ray and Thomas talking about how cognitive neuroscience is unlocking the physical basis of personal experience.
 
The first INSTAL festival (programmed by Barry Esson of Arika and Tiernan Kelly) featured a line-up including Robert Lippock, Philip Jeck, Fennesz, Paragon Ensemble, Icebreaker International, Defaalt and Rhomboi.
 
The program of composed music including Feldman’s Instruments III, Ligeti’s piece for 100 Metronomes Poeme Sympathetique, and Rebonds B by Iannis Xenakis.
 
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.
 
Autobiographical detail becomes a lens to reflect and refract the deepest aspects of personal and social life in Delany’s ground-breaking non-fiction writing.
 
‘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.
 
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.
 
The Songspiels take on a mode of musical theatre developed by playwright Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill in the early twentieth century, presenting political and social concerns through the accessible and (often funny) form of song.
 
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.