
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 dense materialist experience at the limits of contemporary computer music, drawing on Korean Shamanism and Communism; striving to create a strange new vibration to the world that seems to contain the seed of everything.
How might two of the great musicians working within contrasting traditions of freedom collaborate? What might this produce: musically, socially, allegorically?
Can we use sound, repetition and difference to personally and collectively engage with space, time and labour?
Leading language/ action/ sound poet performed his groundbreaking concrete poem, a dizzying mandala of text, symbols and rubber stamps; a kind of book as reading machine.
A somehow hyper-modern, ancient and folkloric lip-synced, made-up, fashioned performance.
A parody of a (Manhattan) road movie and meditation on bifurcation, in paths traveled between the seen and the heard; a road trip played over and over from different perspectives.
In a moment of social exhaustion, we want to ask how we might care for each other differently. We Can’t Live Without Our Lives is a 5-day exploration of care as a form of struggle and resistance, with communities who embody it.
Quasi-theatrical multiple-projector pieces play with the relationship between performers, art and audiences.
Includes: a classic of innovative computer graphics, ex-pat Scot McLaren on form, a riotous psychedelic oil show with a Soft Machine accompaniment, subtle manipulation of data feedback, a colourful road movie and a reworking of a lost Paul Sharits film.
One-shot sonic portraits of 4 houses, their inhabitants and their relationship to sound, from 2 of the most deep-thinking field-recording artists around.
Poems are kisses, fists, and underground rivers. For all these reasons and many more, I am a poet.