 
Merzbow
Merzbow takes the junk of sound and transforms it into blistering noise assaults with an incredible spectrum and impact.
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.
 
Merzbow takes the junk of sound and transforms it into blistering noise assaults with an incredible spectrum and impact.
 
Everyday objects and materials (rubber bands, paper, a sink, microphones) disabused of their inertia and made to speak for themselves in a kind of focusing in on the tiny, repetitive, almost unobserved (sonic/ visual) potential of everyday things put into motion.
 
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.”
 
A system in which oscillators shake The Arches, seismographs pick up the harmonics that are then amplified through massive sub-bass PA.
 
Daniel Carter & Sabir Mateen’s trio with percussionist Andrew Barker; incessantly driving forward through sweat-drenched bursts of pure ecstatic freedom.
 
Durational group-mind drone and clatter: bamboo, electronics, the contents of your local ironmongers bin. A 3-hour set from this legendary Japanese improvisation group.
Artist Derek Lodge running a specially designed social space, somewhere for conversation, story-telling and interaction.
 
Three workshops lead up to an open invitation to improvise with the festival as concert. The last four hours of the Sunday 14 at Instal 10 were devoted to presentations devised during the three workshops. The material conditions (time, space, facilities…) were the instruments. From there anything could happen.
 
Final workshop exploring work, care and class. Does the ‘care industry’ summon forth its own class? Can this ‘affective class’, in their ability to care for others, militate against the carelessness of self-interest?
 
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.
 
Argument is a provocative, multi-layered film essay, a trenchant analysis of the media and remains a critically relevant and critically inflammatory tract.
 
(Cyber)feminist, non-essentialist transgender and queer daily radio shows using the formula of morning radio as an arch way of thinking about the scripted behaviour and controlled empathy of systematic care.