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.
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.
Blissed-out sun-dappled drone ragas of the highest order, with a metal-tinged signature sound of plucked and bowed strings.
A festival hewn from passions for experimental music, film and visual art and for a passion in figuring out how they can relate to, cross-fertilise and inspire and each other.
How do communities formed under the duress of violent othering and the joy of solidarity – such as ballroom culture, Black diasporas, Zapatistas – reform bonds of kinship?
Ecstatic, intensely joyous experimental club music: like “the sound of our water ceremonies…40 bands playing their melodies at once to recreate the cacophony of the first aurora and the call of the morning star Venus”.
Databases carry the same seeds of creativity that early documentary makers saw in film. Both can empower people by helping them to master information, both can be claimed to represent some kind of reality or truth.
Taking a scalpel to the relationship between performer and audience: cutting something out to see what’s left, a drastic subtraction and shift of emphasis.
Mirror and Phantom Engineer performing an improvised soundtrack to Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 horror film prototype, Haxan: Witchcraft through the Ages.
An contradictory guitarist, he’s equally at home in slow, halting acoustic improvisation or piercing minimal examinations of electric guitar.
Julius’ “small music” features simple snatches of found sound, played back through small speakers, often set in bowls of pigment and dirt which shimmies in the vibrations.
Jarrod Fowler creates a social space where layered one-to-one live encounters with the audience become sonic material.
Jarrod Fowler and Christof Migone kick things off with performances involving edible plants, a saw, dandruff, and Christof responding to the prompt: “as far as you can for as long as you can.”
