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.
Here we’re grouping documentation of the many performances of improvised music that have taken place at our festivals over the years but also work that tests out a hypothesis in real time. Current highlights from this collection include William Parker and Daniel Carter’s freewheeling duo exploration, John Tilbury and Wadada Leo Smith’s meeting across traditions and Howard Slater’s talk about individual and collective practices in free jazz.
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.
With a signature spartan sound and long term preoccupation in structural tactics (subtle shifts in density, drawn out stasis) Polwechsel blur the boundaries between individual instruments.
Free jazz pianist John Blum with an everywhere-at-once presence in duo with Jackson Krall, incendiary free jazz drummer and sound sculptor
A recently reanimated Ascension, with mighty Leeds drum hero Paul Hession bringing a dense polyrhythmic torrent into play with Jaworzyn’s reinvigorated piercing guitar.
Los Glissandinos work with clarinet and sine tones beating and thrumming in your middle ear, all beautifully paced and serene, but with just enough steely menace broiling under the surface to keep you on edge.
Improvising violinist Angharad Davies performing with pianists Tisha Mukarji and Andrea Neumann.
A sound of buzzing and flickering metallic drones, glottal stops and guttural growls, and also an explosiveness and purity of sound that reminds you as much of Bill Dixon as anyone else.
A guitar solo of frugal wringing, of notes in the dark, an attitude of making everything count.
Guitar solo where inscrutable, minute electric sounds are excavated by palms that smother and strangle, that wring sound from the fretboard, from behind the bridge.
Imagery, drawn from what seems like hundreds of different films is overlaid and combined in a promissory rainbow of new meanings and impossible scenarios, with the unsettling feel of daylight shadows.
A performance for projectionist, musicians and audience, which plays with references to Oscar Levant and Gershwin: apparently a series of small doses of chaos.
A system in which film is projected onto copper strips, captured again and then re-projected as video, somehow transforming the original imagery into molasses-slow, molten and incredibly tactile flickers of colour and light.