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.
Improvising using nothing so much as the passage of time as his instrument, Basinski creates works of great melancholic depth and fragile beauty.
The final iteration of Arika’s INSTAL festivals, the 2010 edition was an experimental festival of experimental music – 3 days of events at the Tramway that explored un-average ideas about sound and music.
The site of the former Abbeyhill Station on the 1903 Leith branch of the Edinburgh and Dalkeith railway, overgrown and leading to as yet un-regenerated ‘wasteland’; taxi’s for 80 people, each instructed to take different routes between locations and; a slice of land concealed behind corporate business park branding off the Wester Approach Rd, apparently of no conceivable use and named ‘Chateaux de Scum’ by those who use it anyway.
How might two of the great musicians working within contrasting traditions of freedom collaborate? What might this produce: musically, socially, allegorically?
A voice that can vault from an elegantly whispered insinuation to asphyxiated and murderous barks or squalls in a heartbeat.
In many ways, this Episode is our attempt to engage with Fred’s incredible writing: with his proposal that all black performance (culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself) is improvisation.
Jandek performing at the Scottish Rite Theatre in Austin, Texas with Juan Garcia, Nick Hennies and Chris Cogburn.
Usurper jamming live in a skip at the site of Bud’s Neill’s Lobey Dosser statue on Woodlands Road.
A slowed down single tracking shot along a corridor as workers at the Bath Iron Works, (Maine, USA) take their lunch break.
Music is full of refracted brass and wind tones, distorted tape loops, dead silent air and the occasional piercing shard of sound.
Tormented and drawn-out high-pitched yelps and drones, all interleaved with periods of torpid silence.
What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the voguing ball scene going on in Harlem had travelled downtown to perform alongside the early postmoderns at Judson Church?
