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.
Post consideration and post rationalisation… How do we think about experimental music and film after the performance?
Akio Suzuki and John Butcher performing in an abandoned oil tanker on Hoy.
Part old-fashioned Renaissance man, part hardcore avant-gardist, the Canadian painter-photographer-filmmaker-musician gives full vent to his genius in the exhilarating perceptual vaudeville, named after the ‘central region’ of tissue that acts as a conduit between the brain’s two hemispheres.
A performed reflection on Malin’s previous re-enacting of a super influential landmark of performance art from the French feminist and artist Gina Pane.
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.
Each of these films addresses place, landscape or location and the personal reaction to their magical or concrete properties. Watch out for Kren’s structural, throbbing investigation of a forest and Baillie’s intimate and humble essay on a blind guitarist and the relationship between songs of Mexican revolutionaries and the people and places they looked to inspire.
Thought and action, writing and protesting. A chat with Nat Raha, KUCHENGA and Jackie Wang asking what can be learnt from writing across genres by agitators, activists and abolitionists?
The films in the programme take the essential and fundamental building blocks of cinema (combining sound and image through time) screw about with them, interrogate them and cast them anew.
A kind of performed installation of searing noise and silence, where we’re not sure who the performer is, when it starts or ends or even who it’s for.
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.
Performances at Anthology Film Archives NY by Jandek, Loren Mazzacane Connors & Alan Licht, and MV & EE.