Episode 4: Freedom is a Constant Struggle
Do art forms like black radical poetry, free jazz and improvisation create a space for the performance of freedom? Did they ever? And can they still do so now?
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Do art forms like black radical poetry, free jazz and improvisation create a space for the performance of freedom? Did they ever? And can they still do so now?
Work that focuses in on the static hiss and background noise of recording and pushes it to the fore.
A celebration of our overabundant social entanglement and complicity, that remind us of how we can see ourselves, stripped of powers’ attempts to grasp us.
Los Glissandinos work with clarinet and sine tones beating and thrumming in your middle ear, all beautifully paced and serene, but with just enough steely menace broiling under the surface to keep you on edge.
Beat poet Ira Cohen’s now infamous and wildly psychedelic film odyssey feeds one’s own seeing apparatus through beautifully warped and distorting mylar mirrors, resulting in a film dense and rich with visual arcana and poetry.
Boston duo of saxophonist Bhob Rainey and trumpeter Greg Kelley approach their improvisations with a slew if extended techniques and pregnant silences.
Cardboard boxes, metal guitar, critical homage, attempts to describe things you can’t describe. A one-man Grand Guignol school play.
A kind of audience activating, structured film guessing game in the manipulation of time, sound and image. “At 11:15, weiners. At 21:05, pornography. At 23:30, a duet. Watch the Clock.”
Ecstatic, scalding and ludicrously heavy, nobody matches Incapacitants for live noise energy. One of the most exhilarating live acts in underground music.
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.
The site of the former Abbeyhill Station on the 1903 Leith branch of the Edinburgh and Dalkeith railway, overgrown and leading to as yet un-regenerated ‘wasteland’; taxi’s for 80 people, each instructed to take different routes between locations and; a slice of land concealed behind corporate business park branding off the Wester Approach Rd, apparently of no conceivable use and named ‘Chateaux de Scum’ by those who use it anyway.
Vanessa Place talks at The Friday Event series at the Glasgow School of Art about her practice as a writer.