Listener as Operator
Howard Slater
Our favourite Lancashire-born autodictact asks what’s political about the tension between the individual and the collective in free jazz.
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.
Our favourite Lancashire-born autodictact asks what’s political about the tension between the individual and the collective in free jazz.
How might two of the great musicians working within contrasting traditions of freedom collaborate? What might this produce: musically, socially, allegorically?
Perhaps the paradigm of America’s covert musical subculture, Sun City Girls operate just over the border of raucous delirium.
Akio Suzuki and John Butcher performing in an abandoned oil tanker on Hoy.
Ever changing coven of feedback worshipping witches led by Blood Stereo/ Smack Music 7 shrieker Karen Constance spit audio hexes through yr skulls.
AMM have undoubtedly been among the most important contributors to the UK free improv scene for nearly 40 years and we are extremely proud to be able to be working with such distinguished musicians who still rarely play live in the UK.
Smith/Stewart set up allegorical situations over which they often have little to no control, but which instigate explorations of dependence and trust, the body, sex and death.
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.
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.
Jumping off from Sun Ra’s thoughts on evil, and the Alien films, this performance will explore how the sociality Sondra wants to visualise and participate in has no interest in respectability.
Whether drawing their own fractured, abstract narrative, or re-contextualising, chewing up and spitting out someone else’s, each of the films here take a dramatic arc as their starting point and throw it to the wind.
What might Carter and Parker’s collaboration tell us about our own performances of responsibility and liberty, whether individual, social or musical?