Paragon Ensemble
Paragon Ensemble
Glasgow based contemporary music group Paragon Ensemble performing an improvisation with Pete Dowling, Nick Fells, Robert Irvine and others.
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.
Glasgow based contemporary music group Paragon Ensemble performing an improvisation with Pete Dowling, Nick Fells, Robert Irvine and others.
Includes: a polish counting lesson, around NYC with D A Pennebaker, a portrait of a tower block, a man with a spade, at home with KYTN regular Guy Sherwin, a cinematic Blair Witchish cut-up and a song for some swings.
Includes: solar flares, insect fireworks, a new film from Ian Helliwell, pulsating glaciers, an apple being eaten alive, sea ravaged stock, crushed blackberries and film that has literally risen from the grave.
A sound of buzzing and flickering metallic drones, glottal stops and guttural growls, and also an explosiveness and purity of sound that reminds you as much of Bill Dixon as anyone else.
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.
As opposed to suggesting soundtrack’s to Brakhage’s works [which are almost entirely silent] Text of Light use his works to stimulate improvisation, enveloping them into the structure of the group much like an additional musician.
Post consideration and post rationalisation… How do we think about experimental music and film after the performance?
60 cycle hums, jagged static cracklings, and clipped electron pinpricks, mutating them into sublime, post-techno grooves
Heat-mapped bodies, found porn films, Korean psyche-folk, creepy police intrusion and self-defence.
5 days of film, music, discussion and study of our collective incompleteness—arrayed against the colonial ordering of how we come to know the world—practicing how we might exist otherwise, right here and now. Can we start to know and practice the world to come?
Reading their letters to each other, and chatting about prefigurative politics as the practice of relentlessly building worlds through unspeakable violence and loss; of building worlds and living in them anyway.