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.
Munehiro Narita’s Kyoaku No Intention (Worst Intentions) fired out some of the most compelling no-wave improvised rock of the 80s.
Amid the blur of erotics, the jangle of poetics, and the fetishizing of sickness and disability, the heat of Panteha’s performance and sculpture freezes all.
Some of the most breathtaking, delicate and smoke filled guitar playing this side of Loren Connors or the quieter sides of Keiji Haino.
We wanted to ask a bunch of the best high-energy-improvisers around; can musical form really taking shape via a group energy? Can individual concentration lead to a group consciousness?
There exist places in our towns and cities that are created not by design, but by circumstance. Shadowed Spaces was a tour of overlooked, bypassed and unconsidered nooks and crannies with 3 musicians.
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.
One-shot sonic portraits of 4 houses, their inhabitants and their relationship to sound, from 2 of the most deep-thinking field-recording artists around.
HEAVY Japanese super group, featuring the sundown delta blues of Kan Mikami, Toshi Ishizuka’s heavy, time folding drumming and Masayoshi Urabe on sax, harmonica and chains.
A dense materialist experience at the limits of contemporary computer music, drawing on Korean Shamanism and Communism; striving to create a strange new vibration to the world that seems to contain the seed of everything.
A guitar solo of frugal wringing, of notes in the dark, an attitude of making everything count.
Arika is working in partnership with Decriminalised Futures on a multi year collaboration featuring multiple creative projects exploring sex worker lives, experiences and movement struggles.