Episode 2: A Special Form of Darkness
A festival asking how ideas of nihilism, darkness, subjectivity and abjection play out in experimental music, performance art, horror, neuroscience and philosophy?
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A festival asking how ideas of nihilism, darkness, subjectivity and abjection play out in experimental music, performance art, horror, neuroscience and philosophy?
Black-clad with an ominous aura created by their distorted guitar epics, burnt-out ballads and raucous mantric jams.
A poet, playwright and activist, Sanchez emerged as a seminal figure in the 1960s Black Arts Movement, writing in the name of black culture, civil rights and women’s liberation.
John Butcher plays and manipulates a feeding back saxophone. Benedict Drew on electronics, broken cables and standing waves.
A recently reanimated Ascension, with mighty Leeds drum hero Paul Hession bringing a dense polyrhythmic torrent into play with Jaworzyn’s reinvigorated piercing guitar.
An contradictory guitarist, he’s equally at home in slow, halting acoustic improvisation or piercing minimal examinations of electric guitar.
By focusing on the things that most people don’t notice or pass by uncaring – Steve Roden crafts gentle, sparse and metaphorically loaded compositions.
The Echo project is an installation as audio guide for a crowd. And at the same time it’s a private conversation: with you, as one of 20 people in a room, a sort of public intimacy.
Relative patterns of occlusion and exposure occupy two screens. Each exposure fires a stroboscopic flash of colour: yellow for one screen; blue for the other, filling the centre of both screens with colour, haloed with after-images.
Solo performance by Diamanda Galás one of the great artists of the last forty years. Hers is an emotional expressionism of demonic shrieks, operatic falsettos, glottal clicks and diabolical growls.
A chat with Rashad about the communist, conceptual methodology that informs his ground-breaking synthetic music—a form of speculative sonic fiction writing to produce hyperreal non-representational auditive experiences.
Each film in this programme celebrates process; the decay of emulsion, the properties of dust and dirt, the manipulation of time. Post the dawn of the digital age, we reflect on our love of the film form, celluloid as an object, a medium and a physical entity.