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.
Politicised fan-fiction chronicling working class gay urban space and fantasy.
MICRO 1 – Wrap a live microphone with a very large sheet of paper. Make a light bundle. Keep the microphone live for another 5 minutes. T. Kosugi – (1961)
Junko’s screaming vocal in a nuanced, piercing duo with Urabe’s fuming and convulsive saxophone, far removed from the codes of musical tradition.
John Butcher plays and manipulates a feeding back saxophone. Benedict Drew on electronics, broken cables and standing waves.
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.
The first INSTAL festival (programmed by Barry Esson of Arika and Tiernan Kelly) featured a line-up including Robert Lippock, Philip Jeck, Fennesz, Paragon Ensemble, Icebreaker International, Defaalt and Rhomboi.
A 100 strong Feral Choir of people who’ve never improvised with their voices before, conducted by composer Phil Minton.
Our favourite Lancashire-born autodictact asks what’s political about the tension between the individual and the collective in free jazz.
Robin Hayward – exploring the micro-sounds of a tuba, filling slowly with sand.
Can a collective performance of NourbeSe’s poem of black life as it exceeds containment enact alternative forms of selfhood that emerge in and out of African diasporic experience?
Deliberately blurred drones, absent of definite structure or rhythm, framed in silence and devoid of any distraction from the pure matter of sound.
A performed film lecture exploring how the ‘Rumberas’ of Caribbean cinema of the 40’s and 50’s subverted demeaning images of themselves through dance, sound and a sociality that insisted on blackness as being a cultural performance, not simply due to skin colour.
