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.
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Talk charting the radical history of experimental music in Japan + the lowdown into the careers of many of the artists appearing at MLFC.
How can we imagine bodies not as an end in themselves, but as a medium through which we can become one another’s means?
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.
Miniscule free-noise hissy-fits and broken instrument scrape/ squeal jams from the fools what brought you Giant Tank.
A panel exploring the poetics of abolition. “Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change.”
A Performance exploring the nature of acousmatic listening; sound removed from visual context and understood for it’s own properties.
The second edition of the INSTAL festival broadened it’s scope to include performances from Francisco Lopez, Phil Niblock, Stefan Mathieu, Alva Noto, Ryoji Ikeda and John Wall.
Post consideration and post rationalisation… How do we think about experimental music and film after the performance?
The site of the former Abbeyhill Station on the 1903 Leith branch of the Edinburgh and Dalkeith railway, overgrown and leading to as yet un-regenerated ‘wasteland’; taxi’s for 80 people, each instructed to take different routes between locations and; a slice of land concealed behind corporate business park branding off the Wester Approach Rd, apparently of no conceivable use and named ‘Chateaux de Scum’ by those who use it anyway.
Ex-Decaer Pinga and CKDH rodeo queens; regular ladynoise hoedown gets gatecrashed by sonic chunder-huffing remedial clatter boys.
Sometimes delicate, sometimes harsh and jarring, Yagi’s koto solos are as much inspired by Nancarrow or Cage as they are traditional.
Ian and Gil will host a discussion on the Argument project’s social and political commentaries, and with you try and maybe think through whether and how they might still have some currency today: what’s changed and what’s stayed the same?