
Sparklers and Table Top Set
Lee Patterson
Sonic ‘observations’ of the world, through micro recordings on a tiny scale and transformed into something musically compelling.
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.
Sonic ‘observations’ of the world, through micro recordings on a tiny scale and transformed into something musically compelling.
This programme takes human subjects as the focus for sound and image construction. And it includes a couple of masterpieces of experimental film: Paul Sharits’ deeply empathetic interpretation of epilepsy and Peter Kubelka’s Webern inspired abstract portrait of Arnulf Rainer.
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.
A cinema of the mind, a film to take place in the viewers’ imagination(s).
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 performed film lecture exploring how the ‘Rumberas’ of Caribbean cinema of the 40’s and 50’s subverted demeaning images of themselves through dance, sound and a sociality that insisted on blackness as being a cultural performance, not simply due to skin colour.
Miniscule free-noise hissy-fits and broken instrument scrape/ squeal jams from the fools what brought you Giant Tank.
Each of these films addresses place, landscape or location and the personal reaction to their magical or concrete properties. Watch out for Kren’s structural, throbbing investigation of a forest and Baillie’s intimate and humble essay on a blind guitarist and the relationship between songs of Mexican revolutionaries and the people and places they looked to inspire.
Merzbow takes the junk of sound and transforms it into blistering noise assaults with an incredible spectrum and impact.
How can we imagine bodies not as an end in themselves, but as a medium through which we can become one another’s means?
Music is full of refracted brass and wind tones, distorted tape loops, dead silent air and the occasional piercing shard of sound.
The program of composed music including Feldman’s Instruments III, Ligeti’s piece for 100 Metronomes Poeme Sympathetique, and Rebonds B by Iannis Xenakis.