Wadada Leo Smith
Wadada Leo Smith
A performance bearing witness to a struggle built upon patience and collective action from the great multi-instrumentalist and member of the AACM.
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 performance bearing witness to a struggle built upon patience and collective action from the great multi-instrumentalist and member of the AACM.
Guitar solo where inscrutable, minute electric sounds are excavated by palms that smother and strangle, that wring sound from the fretboard, from behind the bridge.
A dismantled, performed film, where a narrator pieces together the sounds, images and storytelling of a documentary about Hurricane Katrina before a live audience.
A chat, with examples (Zola, H. P. Lovecraft, Hammer Horror), about blackness and the sheer stupid thickness of what has no profundity whatsoever.
From really simple, open instructions, An Unrhymed Chord creates a kind of half-way point between composition and improvisation.
Perhaps the paradigm of America’s covert musical subculture, Sun City Girls operate just over the border of raucous delirium.
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.
A dialogical meeting of Baraka’s radical poetry and Grimes’ free jazz syncopation.
William cradles, hammers, and rains down blows, plucking and using 2 bows to attack the strings above and below the bridge, all in the service of a fiery and passionate creativity.
How can we imagine bodies not as an end in themselves, but as a medium through which we can become one another’s means?
A double bill of A (imageless) film of nothing but a sound recording and its transcription and a found film of news interviews about Malcolm X’s assasination, where the filmmaker decided to add nothing to it, except our attention.
Cardboard boxes, metal guitar, critical homage, attempts to describe things you can’t describe. A one-man Grand Guignol school play.