Adrena Adrena is a collaboration between visual artistDaisy Dickinson and drummer E-Da Kazuhisa. Kazuhisa was previously the drummer of the Japanese noise band Boredoms and is currently with the British electronic/post-rock band Seefeel. The duo cut a raw blend of drums, noise and organic visual work, featuring in their performances an eight-foot white sphere that hangs above Kazuhisa’s drum kit and which Dickinson maps videos on to; her work was described by William Barns-Graham of Fluid Radio as ‘cosmological and transcendental, drawing attention to the wonder of the earth and our sensuality on it’.
Career
Their debut was at the International Festival of Projections in early 2016, and they have since performed at the End of the Road Festival, Supernormal Festival, Fort Process Festival, Zorofest in Leipzig, Splice Festival and other shows across the UK and Europe with Acid Mothers Temple and members of Wire and Bo Ningen. In 2016, the pair completed a short film, Man on the Hill, which features Kazuhisa playing drums on fire in the mountains. The film has since been featured on the British Council Film website. In 2016 the film was nominated for the BFI London Film Festival, the Encounters Short Film and Animation Festival, the BAFTA qualifying Aesthetica Short Film Festival, , and the . The film was also featured in i-D Magazine Japan, naming Dickinson as one of the five most watched filmmakers in Japan at the time. After completing Man on the Hill, they went on to release their first music videoToy, premiering on the Ransom Note in 2017 and following that appeared at various shows across the UK and Europe alongside the likes of Damo Suzuki and Immersion and Snapped Ankles, where their performance was described by Loud and Quiet as "it looked like a planet, a marble, the inside of a brain, or was filled by trapped insects and humans. The effect was transfixing, and comes highly recommended." They are featured as one of Cafe Oto's artists, accompanied by a review from Gavin Burrows of the blog Lucid Frenzy which reads "The centre of the stage was taken up by projections which, always simple and often semi-abstract, never stole the limelight from the music. It was more like watching a trio, just one at work on different senses to the others. Pretty soon you weren't taking in the sights and sounds as separate elements at all, but hand been induced into a kind of synaesthesia. And if that seems like we're reverting to Sixties terminology like 'trip' we might as well go with it.... it felt like a trip, like being taken through some other reality then dumped back in ours at the end." In January 2018 they performed for the opening night of the London Short Film Festival at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, presenting a one-off audiovisual collaboration with a 360-degree nebulous orb defying the conventions of theatrical presentation as musicians performed in-the-round beneath multiple circular projections created by Dickinson. The improvised live set curated by Adrena Adrena featured guest musicians Damo Suzuki, Geraldine Swayne, Colin Newman, Malka Spigel and Kenichi Iwasa.
