
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.
A dialogical meeting of Baraka’s radical poetry and Grimes’ free jazz syncopation.
‘Ten Pieces in the Form of Painful Variations’ for piano, an impossible score that looks like a grapeshot musical stave, a text of barbed loathing and doubt – an anti-composition.
A landmark film on black life – a poetic filmic constellation of meditations, fragments and interviews on what it means to be black in America in the 21st century, from one of its great cinematographers.
A riot of 60’s psychedelia, magick, ritual and tight black leather, this programme highlights underground innovators who use and subvert pop music for their own experimental ends; and be warned, in Anger, there’s real darkness.
There are core ways in which our listening to the radio differs from other kinds of listening. What happens when we pay attention to how we pay attention?
Reading their letters to each other, and chatting about prefigurative politics as the practice of relentlessly building worlds through unspeakable violence and loss; of building worlds and living in them anyway.
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.
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 temporary archive and research space tracing the ways in which sound and audition move through everyday life.
The Songspiels take on a mode of musical theatre developed by playwright Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill in the early twentieth century, presenting political and social concerns through the accessible and (often funny) form of song.
What might Carter and Parker’s collaboration tell us about our own performances of responsibility and liberty, whether individual, social or musical?