Merzbow
Merzbow takes the junk of sound and transforms it into blistering noise assaults with an incredible spectrum and impact.
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.
Merzbow takes the junk of sound and transforms it into blistering noise assaults with an incredible spectrum and impact.
Do art forms like black radical poetry, free jazz and improvisation create a space for the performance of freedom? Did they ever? And can they still do so now?
In many ways, this Episode is our attempt to engage with Fred’s incredible writing: with his proposal that all black performance (culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself) is improvisation.
A drone installation populated by flourescent strip lights working in complicity with analogue radios – “all the lights just do their thing”.
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 old underground reservoir in Fife.
Percussion used to explore the social construction of space
Birthed from the collective stagger in global consciousness of the late 50’s and 60’s, this programme celebrates epochal, groundbreaking films that all address sound in their own way and that have opened pathways to experimentation.
Like walking through the abstracted amalgamation of 30 or so storms, trays of water shaken by thunder, light bouncing off pools.
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.
A conversation about the movement for prison abolition and refusing the logic of race and sex that underpins the criminalisation and mass incarceration of communities.
A live installation of the ‘Film Ist’: projected on 4 huge screens and an improvised soundtrack from 4 figureheads of the Austrian experimental music scene.