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.
What kind of listening and acknowledging do we offer each other? What is it to listen to an ‘elsewhere’, and do we ever do anything else when we listen to music?
Everyday objects and materials (rubber bands, paper, a sink, microphones) disabused of their inertia and made to speak for themselves in a kind of focusing in on the tiny, repetitive, almost unobserved (sonic/ visual) potential of everyday things put into motion.
Can we use sound, repetition and difference to personally and collectively engage with space, time and labour?
How black radical practices of abolition imagine a way out of the caging and mass killing of life.
The final iteration of Arika’s INSTAL festivals, the 2010 edition was an experimental festival of experimental music – 3 days of events at the Tramway that explored un-average ideas about sound and music.
A solo improvisation using just the situation of the concert: a space, a PA, Mattin’s own thoughts, you, the audience.
Blissed-out sun-dappled drone ragas of the highest order, with a metal-tinged signature sound of plucked and bowed strings.
A chat, with examples (Zola, H. P. Lovecraft, Hammer Horror), about blackness and the sheer stupid thickness of what has no profundity whatsoever.
Black Boned Angel’s is a rock sound, stripped of all extraneous detail right down to its core, stretched out and nailed to the ceiling.
A preposterously heavy, eye of the storm musical tug of war, in which two drummers, electronics and electric guitar fall over each other in a droning crush.
Formed as a means to realise William Bennett’s goal of “a sound that could bludgeon an audience into submission”
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.
