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.
A meditation on how all of us perform — sometimes reinforcing, sometimes subverting — the shifting categories of gender, sexuality and race.
UNINSTAL was a set of events at Tramway that tested out radical ideas with leading local and international artists. A collection of events (performances, films, installations, walks and talks) about sound and listening.
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.
Sound and image slipping out of synch and into discord, the programme includes (in London at least) a very special version of Hollis Frampton’s masterful (nostalgia) with a live narration by Michael Snow.
Taking a scalpel to the relationship between performer and audience: cutting something out to see what’s left, a drastic subtraction and shift of emphasis.
Akio Suzuki and John Butcher performing in an abandoned oil tanker on Hoy.
Vajra are a Japanese psychedelic rock supergroup, hewn from the collective consciousness of Fushitsusha’s Keiji Haino, folk radical Kan Mikami and percussionist Toshiaki Ishitsuka.
Part old-fashioned Renaissance man, part hardcore avant-gardist, the Canadian painter-photographer-filmmaker-musician gives full vent to his genius in the exhilarating perceptual vaudeville, named after the ‘central region’ of tissue that acts as a conduit between the brain’s two hemispheres.
William cradles, hammers, and rains down blows, plucking and using 2 bows to attack the strings above and below the bridge, all in the service of a fiery and passionate creativity.
(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.
GIO’s bottomless throat, Blood Stereo’s slobber gobbler and the Mouth Of The South tangle tonsils over Steve McCaffrey’s Carnival