Listener as Operator
Howard Slater
Our favourite Lancashire-born autodictact asks what’s political about the tension between the individual and the collective in free jazz.
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.
Our favourite Lancashire-born autodictact asks what’s political about the tension between the individual and the collective in free jazz.
The site of the former Abbeyhill Station on the 1903 Leith branch of the Edinburgh and Dalkeith railway, overgrown and leading to as yet un-regenerated ‘wasteland’; taxi’s for 80 people, each instructed to take different routes between locations and; a slice of land concealed behind corporate business park branding off the Wester Approach Rd, apparently of no conceivable use and named ‘Chateaux de Scum’ by those who use it anyway.
An improvisation that may or may not involve (typical) improvisation.
An immersive environment where sound is looped through oscillators, radio, guitar pick-ups and video amps to create dense strobing images and colours
A discussion about what is at stake in the performance of realness and the practice of passing, and how they are both acts of survival and resistance.
A life force of ecstatic clarity capable of loquacious bursts of affirmation.
How black radical practices of abolition imagine a way out of the caging and mass killing of life.
Includes: street portraits of kids in 1930’s Dakota, a mysterious foggy pilgrimage, a swarm of time-lapsed consumers, a stereoscopic analysis of mill life, up close and personal in a Lighting Bolt mosh pit.
An utterly deep introspection told in aching, weeping guitar lines; melodic, simple, always minimal but somehow entirely epic.
Free jazz pianist John Blum with an everywhere-at-once presence in duo with Jackson Krall, incendiary free jazz drummer and sound sculptor
Out of a dark haze, shafts of lights are picked out from the surface of film. Out of the black silence, noise, audible scratches bloom into a bright drone of broken and cracked objects.
Moor Mother is a musician, Philadelphian housing activist and black quantum futurist.