Smoo Cave
Akio Suzuki John Butcher
Akio Suzuki and John Butcher performing in a remote sea cave near Durness.
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.
Akio Suzuki and John Butcher performing in a remote sea cave near Durness.
Ecstatic, intensely joyous experimental club music: like “the sound of our water ceremonies…40 bands playing their melodies at once to recreate the cacophony of the first aurora and the call of the morning star Venus”.
Stripping back the domesticated ‘meaning’ of (everyday, mundane, kitchen) tools to reveal “a lexicon of rage and frustration.” Plus an allegorical use of mundane, everyday things as an examination of how meaning is constructed in film.
Jandek’s first ever live performance. Unannounced, the performance was a total surprise for everybody at the festival.
African American history, avant-garde jazz riffs and activism intertwine in experimental verse of extraordinary and affecting beauty that has to be heard.
The first of two short film programmes featuring works that blur the boundaries between music and film from artists who cross and redefine those long held divisions. This programme focuses on the forebearers of filmic and musical innovation over the last 70 years.
Reveling in the geometric, mathematical and perceptual relationship between sound and form, this programme features a landmark work of experimental film in Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer; a complex, enduring and expressive of structuralist or flicker films.
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.
Our favourite Lancashire-born autodictact asks what’s political about the tension between the individual and the collective in free jazz.
Audio signals pass through light bulbs, causing the filaments of the bulbs to sing and crackle in a chorus of electronic static.
A chat with Rashad about the communist, conceptual methodology that informs his ground-breaking synthetic music—a form of speculative sonic fiction writing to produce hyperreal non-representational auditive experiences.
The first INSTAL festival (programmed by Barry Esson of Arika and Tiernan Kelly) featured a line-up including Robert Lippock, Philip Jeck, Fennesz, Paragon Ensemble, Icebreaker International, Defaalt and Rhomboi.