Feral Choir
Phil Minton
A Feral Choir of people who’ve never improvised with their voices before, conducted by improviser yodeller, composer Phil Minton.
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.
A Feral Choir of people who’ve never improvised with their voices before, conducted by improviser yodeller, composer Phil Minton.
Whether drawing their own fractured, abstract narrative, or re-contextualising, chewing up and spitting out someone else’s, each of the films here take a dramatic arc as their starting point and throw it to the wind.
UK conceptual/ drone/ noise artist, who is seriously posing what might seem to be unanswerable questions of music.
Tormented and drawn-out high-pitched yelps and drones, all interleaved with periods of torpid silence.
Shutter Interface is an expanded cinema piece: a series of machinegun bursts of chromatic relationships and visual harmonics in an overwhelming montage
Formed as a means to realise William Bennett’s goal of “a sound that could bludgeon an audience into submission”
Three different performances variously featuring: Fritz Welch, loud drums, guitar, local collaborators, paper, memories, Roland Barthes, string quartets
In many ways, this Episode is our attempt to engage with Fred’s incredible writing: with his proposal that all black performance (culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself) is improvisation.
Transfeminist and revolutionary poetry, voice and timbral abstraction: a sounding and spatialising of reparative sonic and somatic practices that can speak back to violent histories of expropriation and ecocide.
Jarrod Fowler and Christof Migone kick things off with performances involving edible plants, a saw, dandruff, and Christof responding to the prompt: “as far as you can for as long as you can.”
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.
Underlying radical transfeminism, as an urgent critique of binary essentialism and fixed identities, is the call for a new kind of thinking that can move between and integrate the truths of all lives in their transformations.