
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.
In a moment of social exhaustion, we want to ask how we might care for each other differently. We Can’t Live Without Our Lives is a 5-day exploration of care as a form of struggle and resistance, with communities who embody it.
Durational group-mind drone and clatter: bamboo, electronics, the contents of your local ironmongers bin. A 3-hour set from this legendary Japanese improvisation group.
Investigating the border between the audible and the visible means looking at the margins, the edges of creativity where artists test out new boundaries and define them anew.
A changing pool of people (40 or so at a time – artists, audiences, etc) talk for 90 minutes in a simultaneous series of open-ended round-table discussions, structured like speed dating, and mixed live as both a concert and for radio broadcast.
Former street performer, organist, performance artist, circus performer, harpist, accordion player, tree surgeon and tricyclist performing solo.
Stripping back the domesticated ‘meaning’ of (everyday, mundane, kitchen) tools to reveal “a lexicon of rage and frustration.” Plus an allegorical use of mundane, everyday things as an examination of how meaning is constructed in film.
What would a world and an ethics look like free from the destructive consequences of the Western mind?
Two-parts Helhesten spit strangled shanties and cracked reeds from under a net of the Glasgow Improv Orchestra’s six-strings and one moustache.
A guitar solo of frugal wringing, of notes in the dark, an attitude of making everything count.
Sound as it is endured by space and the body: 15 participants lie face down and pound the floor with a microphone one thousand times, each person choosing their own rhythm and intensity.
By focusing on the things that most people don’t notice or pass by uncaring – Steve Roden crafts gentle, sparse and metaphorically loaded compositions.