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.
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Talk charting the radical history of experimental music in Japan + the lowdown into the careers of many of the artists appearing at MLFC.
Taking our festivals south of the border to The Sage Gateshead we set out to offer a few cardinal pointers in the vast array of experimental music practices.
A confrontational and somehow shamanic stance; introspective silences shattered by savage jabs at the strings, whirlwind strums dying into spartan chords
A programme looking at landscape, filmic or architectural spaces and at how the fixed stare of a camera frame only captures so much reality; here we focus on how filmmakers structure our relationship with that reality and at how they relate it to or interpret it through sound.
Kylie Minoise Vs Nackt Insecten feedback/ vocal physical threat ‘vs’ ecstatic electronic cloudbursts
Three iconic figures from the Japanese underground assembled as a trio to stand in for the advertised duo of Junko and Jerome Noetinger who was unable to attend the festival due to illness.
Ecstatic, scalding and ludicrously heavy, nobody matches Incapacitants for live noise energy. One of the most exhilarating live acts in underground music.
Everyday objects and materials (rubber bands, paper, a sink, microphones) disabused of their inertia and made to speak for themselves in a kind of focusing in on the tiny, repetitive, almost unobserved (sonic/ visual) potential of everyday things put into motion.
French improviser, composer, writer & musical thinker of dry humour and elegant clarity. Sly conjurer of music from the unconsidered processes of music making.
A double bill of Morgan Fisher films that ask what can be achieved by a simple structural method of commenting on scraps of 35mm film, re-shot on 16mm film and what happens to meaning (if anything) when ‘insert shots’ are relieved of their original duty of providing crucial plot development for a variety of other movies?
Acting at the minimum. Each film here substitutes one small thing for another, (ironically) transforming received meanings by the simplest of actions; often kind of funny too.
A meditation on how all of us perform — sometimes reinforcing, sometimes subverting — the shifting categories of gender, sexuality and race.