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.
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Talk charting the radical history of experimental music in Japan + the lowdown into the careers of many of the artists appearing at MLFC.
Do art forms like black radical poetry, free jazz and improvisation create a space for the performance of freedom? Did they ever? And can they still do so now?
Terry is one of the most entertaining and unpredictable musicians in the London free improvising music scene. Rhodri Davies extends his instrument under a battery of techniques creating sound colours and textures quite alien to the harp.
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.”
How do we gesture to the invisible, the trans or the obscure? A performative conversation between boychild and Fernando, a sharing of gestures, and a bodily back and forth between mathematician and dance artist.
Performances of compositions by Jean-Luc Guionnet and others, with Julia Letitia Scott, Iain Campbell F-W, Neil Davidson, Fritz Welch, Liene Rozite, Emilia Beatriz.
How black radical practices of abolition imagine a way out of the caging and mass killing of life.
Out of a dark haze, shafts of lights are picked out from the surface of film. Out of the black silence, noise, audible scratches bloom into a bright drone of broken and cracked objects.
West Coast drone-age guitar grumbler/ consumer electronic reclaimer meets free-thinking clang/ chime/ drone bluesman of The East.
Improvising using nothing so much as the passage of time as his instrument, Basinski creates works of great melancholic depth and fragile beauty.
Noise music for the eyes: projectors turned into instruments, B&W film loops into a thrumming riot of colour, motion and sound.
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?