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.
Philip Jeck creates slowly evolving symphonies that are as much about the crackling hiss of old vinyl as the actual ‘musical’ material.
Harrowing but musical confrontations with the very real, physical and aural trauma of a woman screaming.
‘Ten Pieces in the Form of Painful Variations’ for piano, an impossible score that looks like a grapeshot musical stave, a text of barbed loathing and doubt – an anti-composition.
Acting at the minimum. Each film here substitutes one small thing for another, (ironically) transforming received meanings by the simplest of actions; often kind of funny too.
Sonic ‘observations’ of the world, through micro recordings on a tiny scale and transformed into something musically compelling.
Sparse and miniature free thought workouts involving guitar, vocals and tuba.
A drone installation populated by flourescent strip lights working in complicity with analogue radios – “all the lights just do their thing”.
GIO’s bottomless throat, Blood Stereo’s slobber gobbler and the Mouth Of The South tangle tonsils over Steve McCaffrey’s Carnival
Includes: street portraits of kids in 1930’s Dakota, a mysterious foggy pilgrimage, a swarm of time-lapsed consumers, a stereoscopic analysis of mill life, up close and personal in a Lighting Bolt mosh pit.
Free-jazz chat with Sabir Mateen, Daniel Cater, Andrew Barker – hosted by Byron Coley.
A celebration of risk taking and adventure from some of the boldest pioneers of the past 40 years, melding avant garde and underground forms of music and moving image to create new experiments and experiences in sight and sound.