Image: Jez Burrows

This Friday, experimental music festival INSTAL 10 begins at Tramway in Glasgow. The 3 day event described as ‘an experimental festival of experimental music’ is organised by Arika who are also the name behind Kill Your Timid Notion and Shadowed Spaces.

We talk to Barry Esson, director of Arika about what we can expect from this year’s event.

How did INSTAL come about?

It started off in 2001 with my friend Tiernan Kelly when we both worked at the Arches. I think we thought at the time that there was definitely a need for some kind of platform for more experimental forms of music in Scotland and in Glasgow. Since then it’s grown and we have more and more of a leading role internationally in the radical fringes of experimental music, not just with performance, but with the ideas behind it, with ways of engaging with it, ways for it to be more than just about sound, and ways for people and ideas and communities from outside of music to gain a purchase on it, and to change it. INSTAL started as a festival of experimental music. Now we hope it is an experimental festival of experimental music (and other things besides)

You have described the festival as ‘radical’ – how will this manifest itself?

Some definitions:

Radical: Arising from or going to a root or source; basic: proposed a radical solution to the problem.

We want to make an argument that there are important ideas at the route of music, and experimental music, which give us a unique purchase on the world. Not just ways of making music, but of thinking and doing, and which can be applied to everyday life. Which is to say – what mostly happens to new ideas is a kind of conservatism that incorporates them by divesting them of their political content so that they palatably reinforce the status quo. We want to insist on the possibility of experimental music to contribute to something other, more useful to us all, than the status quo.

Radical: Departing markedly from the usual or customary; extreme: radical opinions on education.

INSTAL is an experimental festival of experimental music. The way we structure it is increasingly informed by our engagement with unusual and uncustomary modes of collective engagement, thinking and doing. It is a set of un-average musical ideas, but importantly it is also structured so as to try and celebrate un-average modes of being together.

Radical: Favouring or effecting fundamental or revolutionary changes in current practices, conditions, or institutions: radical political views.

Music is stuck. Experimental music is too. But at it’s core there are ways it can be rethought. We want to make a modest contribution to this process, and to get at the ways and means by which (experimental) music can raise itself above the dull trajectory of entertainment that is forced upon it.

Image: Jez Burrows

As well as performances there are several discussions taking place – what sort of debates can we expect?

Well, we just want to intelligently think about radical music and how it engages with the world: what it can propose, what it is limited by, what its consequences are if it is to be more than just entertainment… We want to show how all music is a function of things bigger than music alone. And we’re not naïve about this: a lot of music can claim to be a-political but actually simply reproduces the ways in which our lives are dominated. So we’ll be chatting about the ways in which we think the music at INSTAL is influenced by and influences wider concerns with alternative ways to engage with the world.

INSTAL is located at the Tramway – how does this space influence the festival and the events?

A festival should be more than a series of gigs. So we have to think about how to allow for all kinds of divergent and dynamic social interactions to take place, between musicians, artists, audience members, us… Tramway is a large and complex building, so we’ve tried to use all the different spaces, with their different characteristics and capacities and feels to create a festival that has varied kinds of experiences: big gigs that we can all watch together, smaller intimate things that only a few people can see at a time, intense short performances which would be too much if they were more than 15 minutes, long and drawn out contemplative experiences…

Anything you’re particularly looking forward to this year?

I’m looking forward to continuing to not know what will happen, and to finding that out. Obviously we think all of it has a good chance of being amazing, but definitely the riskiest thing we’re doing is the Evacuation of the Great Learning project, which has already started with Glasgow Open School and who will be making up a large part of an autonomous group at the festival, also including the radical noise artist Mattin and philosopher Ray Brassier, who will investigate all kinds of ideas about music and art collectively, and then take over the last 4 hours of the festival on Sunday, to present their findings as a kind of re-imagined idea of what ‘performances’ could be. It’s a major thing for us, but we have no idea what to expect…

For the full programme and more information about Arika visit www.arika.org.uk

Hidden Spaces – what do they mean and how do they affect us? Each person carries with them their own sense of home, tied to their sense of belonging, their past and their wished-of future. From this conception of home we construct the world around us – places we feel safe in, drawn to, wary of, excluded from and intrigued by.  Our idea of these places might change as we grow familiar with them, as personal and emotional associations fluctuate, as our bodies move through space and as others enter or leave that space – constructing spaces of migration, dislocation, settlement and even bereavement, each with conceptually structured layers of surface, accessibility and invisibility overlaying the physical construct of our environment.

With such a subjectively-framed starting point, not only will personal interpretations of hidden spaces vary, but these will be carried into the cultural and professional production of spaces, so an architect’s perception of Hidden Space might be very different from a public artist’s, an anarchist’s or a film location scout’s, and each of these professionals will in turn come to influence how we navigate the space around us.

From this broad and permeable conception of space we’ve drawn a few more concrete examples, and we’ll be featuring differing approaches to the theme of Hidden Spaces. From Curator to Artist to Poet, we’ve invited some guest bloggers to write about their relationships with spaces, here are some of the contributors we’ve got lined up to kick things off:

Matt Baker, in the past Lead Artist for both Inverness and the Gorbals, writing on hidden space from the perspective of someone who makes public art. Read his blogs: hiding, finding and the search, space hidden in things, looking for unconformity… & seasoning time.

Sarah Butler, author and head of the UrbanWords consultancy, developing projects which explore regeneration and place through creative writing. Read her blog here.

Richard Taylor, freelance artist & writer, talks about his collaboration on a project focused on abandoned spaces. Read his blogs: ArtEvict – hidden space and revealing performance, SPLICING HORRISONS, Hidden space – tent as a transitory studio, THE CUMBRIA ENERGY CENTRE & getting lost remaining hidden

Collaborative collective, Sans Facon, gave us a continued visual dairy of hidden spaces being enjoyed in everyday life. See their observations here.

We also had contributions from:
Arika – Shadowed Spaces
Johanna Basford – hidden (work) spaces
Neil McGuire – Hidden Spaces: Supreme Social Networks
Erin McElhinney – What’s in a name?
Susan Castillo – Hidden Space
Fraser Denholm – Tracing Places

Tell us about your hidden spaces - add a link to a blog, a video or photographs from the overlooked or concealed spaces of your city in the comments below.

There are places in the towns and cities where you live that exist not by planned design, but by circumstance. Their elusive ambience attracts those with nowhere else to go, and those who wish to go elsewhere. overlooked bypassed unwatched detached unconsidered shadowed

They offer respites from society and routine. They are found by necessity, by those driven by desire, more than destination. Shadowed Spaces is a tour of nooks and crannies like these, in your towns and cities: forgotten steps that lead nowhere, alleyways, old railway tunnels. We’ll place musical performances in these spaces that will hopefully help us to think about the continued need for a sense of privacy in public.

Find out more about Arika here.

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Barry Esson and Bryony McIntyre gave a presentation about Kill Your Timid Notion, a festival which their Edinburgh based company Arika has run in Dundee (at Dundee Contemporary Arts) since 2003. KYTN can be seen as one of the most successful festivals of its kind within Europe.

As well as KYTN they also do other event and festival projects including Shadowed Spaces and Install. Install, which has a focus on music and performance has taken place at the Arches in Glasgow in the past but is moving to the Tramway this year.

KYTN’s focus has been on experimental sound, image and music and they will continue with this but in a different format this year. The festival, taking place between 21 – 28 February is being built from artist proposals rather than artist objects. In relation to this Barry said that the idea was that ‘films, paintings, sculpture or any object does not incarnate art – the process which produces these is the art’.

With KYTN this year it’s the first time the public focus has been over a week, with Investigations happening right through from Sunday 21 to mid evening on the next Friday. These Investigations will tie in with the artists’ proposals to produce the festival weekend events (and possibly longer term changes / projects and hopefully engagement). The phrase used was: the proposals will be ‘re examined with you the public – people like yourselves and people unlike yourselves’, through the Investigations.

Barry said that he found that the history of theories and practices (especially in his background of sound) was important but should be regularly rewritten. I think that this maybe is related to dealing with / getting free of assumptions – of audience, practitioners and maybe even funders and press about the more elusive or experimental practices that Arika tend to work with, and also I know that it relates to their reconsidering of their own practices as organisers (something I respect and will try to emulate for myself this year).

Arika says that ‘if you spend time with us we will consider it spending money with us’ and so have devised a tally card system that means that if you attend the Investigations you can get gratis passes to the weekend  pay events. (2 investigations = one day pass, 4 investigations = full weekend pass).

If you are interested in taking part – you need to act though as the Investigations are filling up, look at the programme online.

Other free highlights will be a free screening of a film from the legendary British filmmaker John Smith – see you there…

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To find out what Dundee Popup was all about or to read more reviews & blogs  from the day, click here.

It’s already looking like a great day and a great turnout of people, but don’t fret if you can’t be here. Along with some of Censta’s members we’ll be blogging and tweeting the day. Watch out for blogs in the Dundee Popup group, follow @censta for tweets, tagged #dundeepopup and there will be photos uploaded by Ross_McLean all through the day and footage coming from Andy later in the week.

Posters by Superfly have been spotted all round the city, and the LTD edition booklets by SooperDD and Johanna Basford are already a coveted item.

The blogs as they come in…… and the tweets for the day.

And here’s the first blog … read all about Public Image at the Cooper Gallery @DCJAD.

Lots of people meeting, eating and blogging in between tours at the Censta hub at the Dundee Rep.

Emlyn Firth gives the lowdown on the DJCAD graduates showcase, including a live link up on Skype.

Our very own Suzy Glass gives her view of the Dalziel & Scullion studio tour.

Ever been inside the coveted doors of Realtime Worlds? Jon Carlos went along, what did he see?

Censta and members got a very special sneak preview of the soon to be re-opened and very much renovated McManus Gallery. Gillian Easson gives you an idea of what’s in store.

Heidi Proven disappeared into the Visual Research Centre at Dundee Contemporary Arts, and thinks you should too.

JonGill took in the DCA Print studio, screen printing, etching, block, lino and litho. Jessica Ashman gave us her account of the DCA Print Studio tour too.

Martin Boyce took members round his No Reflections instillation at the DCA, and explained the challenges of exhibiting the work in two different spaces. Here and at Venice Biennalle. Curator Donna HolfordLovell takes us through the talk.

Superfly has an obsession, find out what it is.

Artists and makers from Handmade Heaven, showed off their wares and Censta members a plenty bought things. See what Hellojenuine liked.

Then it was time for This is… at the Hannah Maclure Centre which went like this:
Yuck & Yum told us about the ways they distrubute art without using gallery spaces
Johanna Basford & Sooper DD entertained us with stories of collaboration
Arika went through their KYTN 2009 plans and how you can get involved
Genevieve Ryan & Jo Swingler talked us through recent illustration & creative writing collaboration
We heard and saw music & animation from Colliderscope‘s Fiona Soe Paing
Georgina Follett let us know about the V&A Dundee developments.

These were covered by Htothep, suzy.glass & DJCADExhibitions.

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To find out what Dundee Popup was all about or to read more reviews & blogs  from the day, click here.