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.
Grouped under this theme we are including performances that are explicitly drawing on or related to Noise as a ‘musical’ genre but also as a concept from information theory. Alongside this we’re looking among the archive for work where the idea of ‘no signal’ seems a key element. Keiji Haino’s torrential solo vocal performance from Episode 2: A Special Form of Darkness offers a way in.
Taking a scalpel to the relationship between performer and audience: cutting something out to see what’s left, a drastic subtraction and shift of emphasis.
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.
Sachiko’s very simple, pure sine tones and structures. Otomo on double pianos. Filament’s music isn’t composed and it isn’t improvised: it’s a hybrid of the two.
Duo performance by two great French musique concrète improvisers using feedback, contact mics, tape, an old Revox tape machine, a vintage synth…
Simple maths and stringent scored instructions move precise frequencies and clicks to create a dense, fluctuating environment of standing waves and physical sound.
Polly Shang Kuan Band coven leader and Sick Head’s psychedelic shaman Nackt Insecten make hex ritual to birth a new astral being….. Smack Insecten.
Noise music for the eyes: projectors turned into instruments, B&W film loops into a thrumming riot of colour, motion and sound.
The pieces in the programme switch between silent film/ imageless sound, but we wanted to have a think about how ideas can take up residency on either side of the sound/ image border, without having to inhabit both at the same time.
Laser beam sine tones used to draw delicate, abstract patterns by vibrating charcoal, placed atop of a great strip of paper running through the gallery; beautiful, fragile sound-created autonomous drawing.
Kylie Minoise Vs Nackt Insecten feedback/ vocal physical threat ‘vs’ ecstatic electronic cloudbursts
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?
Thirty lucky Instal punters experience Kylie’s pre-match aggro workout one-on-one in the darkness of an Arches dressing room.