
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.
One of the most influential groups in improvised music, with the collective understanding that comes from listening keenly to each other for decades
Smith/Stewart set up allegorical situations over which they often have little to no control, but which instigate explorations of dependence and trust, the body, sex and death.
An extravagant debauch of plush toys and ritual. Palestine performed a version of Strumming Music, a trance inducing investigation into overtone systems achievable on a Bosendorfer Imperial Piano.
Terry is one of the most entertaining and unpredictable musicians in the London free improvising music scene. Rhodri Davies extends his instrument under a battery of techniques creating sound colours and textures quite alien to the harp.
A talk entitled ‘The Conquest of the Universe’: which delves into the connections between the underground filmmakers and musicians in New York in the early 1960s
A black hole of dense heaviosity, full of slow motion riffage, tectonic pummel and massive planet destroying rock.
The Experimental Improvisers Association of Japan, [EXIAS-J] are a loose collective of musicians and dilettantes who seem to represent an entire and self sufficient scene in one band.
Every aspect of every film is always about more than just film. Or, as Godard said: a tracking shot is a moral issue. A cross between a festival, magazine and discussion about experimental artists’ films.
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.
Mirror and Phantom Engineer performing an improvised soundtrack to Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 horror film prototype, Haxan: Witchcraft through the Ages.
A drone installation populated by flourescent strip lights working in complicity with analogue radios – “all the lights just do their thing”.