
Episode 2: A Special Form of Darkness
A festival asking how ideas of nihilism, darkness, subjectivity and abjection play out in experimental music, performance art, horror, neuroscience and philosophy?
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.
A festival asking how ideas of nihilism, darkness, subjectivity and abjection play out in experimental music, performance art, horror, neuroscience and philosophy?
‘Ten Pieces in the Form of Painful Variations’ for piano, an impossible score that looks like a grapeshot musical stave, a text of barbed loathing and doubt – an anti-composition.
Cardboard boxes, metal guitar, critical homage, attempts to describe things you can’t describe. A one-man Grand Guignol school play.
A trance inducing, flickering investigation of structural and minimalist droning from one of the key thinkers in sound and image over the last 50 years
TEST is a collective creative improvising quartet based out of the NYC Underground (figuratively and literally). Their street-hardened, spatial Jazz is riotous and intense: is also makes us think about collective organization, and different ideas of responsibility and liberty.
Offering a crip grief transformation and witness altar. A place to sit and breathe, remember our dead, wash our hands and leave offerings to and for loved ones we’ve lost – and for ourselves. Expect fire and a little bit of smoke. Concluding with a D/deaf centered social space with conversational interpreters available for those who do not speak ASL.
Former street performer, organist, performance artist, circus performer, harpist, accordion player, tree surgeon and tricyclist performing solo.
A saxophone. Handheld fans. Shrill squeaks. Splutters, gargling. An incredible diversity of sounds, intensely focused by an inventive musician.
The club as a community and a site for performed politics: deep/ queer house, vogue femme, lipsync and ballroom.
A performed self-cancelling discussion, with artists from the festival, invited speakers and local artists talking at once, over each other, or straining to be heard over the din.
Blissed-out sun-dappled drone ragas of the highest order, with a metal-tinged signature sound of plucked and bowed strings.
Minimal details and otherworldly glistening drones, rich with sustained metallic timbres that breathe with the scrapped pulse of bowed metal.