Arika & Counterflows present Chuquimamani-Condori | Rashad Becker | Sunik Kim | Nat Raha and Ailie Ormston

Very pleased that we will be collaborating with our friends at Arika as part of their upcoming festival: Episode 11 – To End The World As We Know It

For the event will be welcoming performances from Chuquimamani-Condori, Rashad Becker, Sunik Kim and a new collaboration with Nat Raha & Ailie Ormston.

Episode 11 brings together five days of film, music, discussion and study to think through our collective incompleteness—arrayed against the ecological and social devastations of a capitalistic, colonial and imperialist worldview that has been obliterating other worlds for over 400 years— to practice how we might exist otherwise, right here and now.

Further information on the festival, including access information, tickets & more, can be found here

aquasomatics
Ailie Ormston and Nat Raha

Ailie Ormston is one of the most striking artists from the Scottish music scene. Using acoustic and electronic materials, their work is constructed through improvisation and assemblage, embracing musical interests in motivic development and timbral abstraction, as well as hifi and lofi sounds, repetition, microtonality and song. Although sprawling in approach, Ailie has a deft hand at reigning their materials, using economy as a key tool to chisel their work and give it its lopsided distinctiveness in solo and collaborative settings.

Holly Pester brilliantly sums up Nat’s poetry when she says that: Raha is a poet who is prepared to say and to un-say common language, to create new spaces of speech, subjectivities that form in language – on the basis of what it’s possible to utter yourself as. As much as it’s queer, transfeminist, communist and revolutionary, Nat’s is also a post-punk poetry: the DIY liveness of her reading voice, which pulls apart and de/re-constructs subject positions in non-linear ways, to make a tune of everything that is written on the page.

Arika and Counterflows have invited Nat and Ailie to rehearse some ideas together, and share them with us in an open rehearsal of collaborative working. As they practice sound and spatialise their thinking around the history of racial capitalism and oceans or water: of reparative sonic and somatic practices that can speak back to violent histories of expropriation and ecocide.

Sunik Kim

A dense materialist experience at the limits of contemporary computer music, drawing on Korean Shamanism and Communism; striving to create a strange new vibration to the world that seems to contain the seed of everything, processes and trajectories as yet unseen.

This sound is a blistering Electro Magnetic Pulse wave of revolutionary hope, exclaiming defiantly that History is not over, that the future is not ‘history,’ that there is still a vast multitude of ideas and identities burning brightly and resiliently, despite the fact that they are inconceivable to the tyrannical Hegemonic axis of global capitalist tech-culture. – Gretchen Aury

Rashad Becker

The most sophisticated synthetic music around is made by a Syrian Communist living in Berlin, who is perhaps better thought of as a fiction writer. Rashad Becker writes (political, social, historical…) narratives and then sonifies them into non-linear compositions that unpick causality in music. But this is also body music: abstract but informed by the club, or by bodies in space, sometimes collected as ‘dances’: you might sway.

Chiquimamani-Condori

Ecstatic, intensely joyous experimental club music: like “the sound of our water ceremonies…40 bands playing their melodies at once to recreate the cacophony of the first aurora and the call of the morning star Venus”. Chuquimamani-Condori combines the traditional drum and ceremonial music from their Pakajaqueño family, with cumbia, tarqueada, and huayño, DJ tags, hyper-compressed digital bass and stargazing synth. Blasted, blown out, overdriven intensity, with everything in the red.