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.
When one calls a strike, who hears the call, who attunes and listens to it? How to listen to the call of a strike? What prevents one from hearing this call or stops one from listening to it?
Somewhere between performance, stripped down theatre and an intense kind of public learning or maybe even a public hearing.
Tiny fragments of sound recombined and woven into spare and precise, violent yet beautiful pieces
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.
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.
This performance brings together film, text and speech and temporarily constructs a filmic space to think through questions of resistance, and the choice and consequence of action vs. inaction: what does it mean to choose to not take part?
Offering a crip grief transformation and witness altar. A place to sit and breathe, remember our dead, wash our hands and leave offerings to and for loved ones we’ve lost – and for ourselves. Expect fire and a little bit of smoke. Concluding with a D/deaf centered social space with conversational interpreters available for those who do not speak ASL.
Beat poet Ira Cohen’s now infamous and wildly psychedelic film odyssey feeds one’s own seeing apparatus through beautifully warped and distorting mylar mirrors, resulting in a film dense and rich with visual arcana and poetry.
Minimal details and otherworldly glistening drones, rich with sustained metallic timbres that breathe with the scrapped pulse of bowed metal.
The Tower performance at KYTN throws into that mix the 70’s fluxus light shows and films of Jeff Perkins and other filmic interventions tuned to their unique frequency.
When we look, how do we objectify the body; how can we reflect on our (self) image as a construction?