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.
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.
Talk charting the radical history of experimental music in Japan + the lowdown into the careers of many of the artists appearing at MLFC.
Acting at the minimum. Each film here substitutes one small thing for another, (ironically) transforming received meanings by the simplest of actions; often kind of funny too.
With Taku we’ll carry out some simple proposals for doing almost nothing, for re-thinking sound with whatever comes to hand.
Akio Suzuki and John Butcher performing by the Stones of Stenness, instead of the Ring of Brodgar, because of bad weather.
A series of events organised by the Vogue’ology collective from the House Ballroom community in New York grounded in the scenes history of autonomous, self-organised struggle and a shared investment in collective art practices and how those intersect with the multiple and often divergent struggles for freedom.
In Ramayya’s visionary poetry, the body assumes as many forms as love produces states: attraction and repulsion, excitement and exhaustion, selfishness and the dissolution of self.
Akio Suzuki and John Butcher performing in an old underground reservoir in Fife.
Investigate film as language, via the language of film reduced to the basic units of film and language. A film as text in which each frame is a single word.
A kind of audience activating, structured film guessing game in the manipulation of time, sound and image. “At 11:15, weiners. At 21:05, pornography. At 23:30, a duet. Watch the Clock.”
Includes: a £20 note, stock fluctuations, an examination of words in the video medium, a linguistic challenge for your mind, a frame by frame dissection 50 words, shop front poetry, image and language head to head and newspapers under the microscope.
A speculative narrative film informed by poetry and theories of quantum entanglement across diasporic distance. An intimate exploration of grief and resistance in shifting landscapes of loss, from the streets to the bed.
Sometimes delicate, sometimes harsh and jarring, Yagi’s koto solos are as much inspired by Nancarrow or Cage as they are traditional.