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.
Akio Suzuki and John Butcher performing in a large multi chambered industrial ice house.
Three speakers play back pre-recorded sounds, Marc listens and responds: “What is played is the imperfect witness of what I listen to (or maybe better, how I listen).”
Part old-fashioned Renaissance man, part hardcore avant-gardist, the Canadian painter-photographer-filmmaker-musician gives full vent to his genius in the exhilarating perceptual vaudeville, named after the ‘central region’ of tissue that acts as a conduit between the brain’s two hemispheres.
Transfeminist, communist, revolutionary poetry that refuses to flinch. Nat Raha presents new work in the nine.
Ecstatic, scalding and ludicrously heavy, nobody matches Incapacitants for live noise energy. One of the most exhilarating live acts in underground music.
A system in which film is projected onto copper strips, captured again and then re-projected as video, somehow transforming the original imagery into molasses-slow, molten and incredibly tactile flickers of colour and light.
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.
Every aspect of every film is always about more than just film. Or, as Godard said: a tracking shot is a moral issue. A cross between a festival, magazine and discussion about experimental artists’ films.
Each film in this programme celebrates process; the decay of emulsion, the properties of dust and dirt, the manipulation of time. Post the dawn of the digital age, we reflect on our love of the film form, celluloid as an object, a medium and a physical entity.
Quasi-theatrical multiple-projector pieces play with the relationship between performers, art and audiences.