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?
This programme is a celebration of Charlemagne Palestine; passionate, extravagant, visceral. Including two sections from Ritual dans le Vide, an extension of his ‘running camera’ works of the 70’s and Pip Chodorov’s vibrant workout of a live version of Strumming Music.
Our favourite Lancashire-born autodictact asks what’s political about the tension between the individual and the collective in free jazz.
The pieces in the programme switch between silent film/ imageless sound, but we wanted to have a think about how ideas can take up residency on either side of the sound/ image border, without having to inhabit both at the same time.
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.
Taking our festivals south of the border to The Sage Gateshead we set out to offer a few cardinal pointers in the vast array of experimental music practices.
A multi-media harp and spoken word tribute to the incalculable, the in-deducible, the suspicious static noise that accompanies the voice of truth, and the attempted aberrations in the domain of emergence.
Goofily deformed, deeply thought vocal jams: like the sound of your own breath rushing through your head.
Somewhere between performance, stripped down theatre and an intense kind of public learning or maybe even a public hearing.
Investigating the border between the audible and the visible means looking at the margins, the edges of creativity where artists test out new boundaries and define them anew.
The Cube is a 6 hour performed installation in which sound and image are treated as independent but equal, where musicians and filmmakers sit alongside each other, improvise to and feed off both projected image and amplified and acoustic sound.
One of the most influential groups in improvised music, with the collective understanding that comes from listening keenly to each other for decades