Supersonic 2023

Supersonic Festival has been very much on my festival bucket list for some time. I don’t remember the first time exactly that I came across one of the line-ups and thought “damn, this is everything I’m really into, I need to make this happen some year”, I mean like literally I could have been any time between 2012 and the one they were supposed to do in 2020, the weird psycho-temporal-distortion effects of the lockdown now mean many things prior to that point are a mash. But at any rate It was on my radar for some while but being in an unfamiliar city over the water and all the hassle with flying and general interest but not to the point of being arsed doing anything about it of my general friend circle has just led to it getting pushed off on the long finger until this year.

Why now? Could just be consciousness of getting older and knowing I might well not be able to do this forever. It could also have been getting to experience the festival in the odd-parasocial way that I did when they had the lockdown live-stream which if not exactly delivering the festival experience in its fullest was still very enjoyable and was able to deliver the vibe and ethos. I would like to think I would have gone that year anyway if not for the plague. Lankum were on the line up and as already a bit of a fan I was intrigued to see what they would do in a bit less restrained setting than the seated CQAF gig I’d been to before.

So this year when I was looking at stuff to do I put the word out I was if not committed then at least tossing up the possibility of going on my own, but of the people I got in touch with, I did get a bite. My mate John who is not on socials and I see maybe once or twice a year pre pandemic, and since him and his wife Tara had a kid and moved out of Dublin during lockdown, not even as much as tha. But he’s a huge Godflesh fan, really liked the look of the rest of the proceedings and committed to the full weekend with the Mrs joining us for the Saturday.

First hurdle of actually getting there ended up being a wee bit of a melt, airport delays, rail strikes and traffic accidents had me getting into Birmingham a little later than expected, then the process of getting settled meant that I didn’t quite get off to the venue, which was a very short walk from our accommodation until the early evening and I missed a few of the first bands.

Or I should say “Venues” – as in the plural. The festival took place between two buildings, one big space for the main room in the 7SVN with all the bigger acts and The Mill, which had mutiple floors, trader room, outdoor food court (which all looked amazing, smelt unreal and were reasonably priced but I couldn’t engage with personally), second venue and a nice roof top garden with its own sound system and DJs. As with Arc Tangent the crack was one room on, one room off and set up between sets, with Merch tables being manned at the back of each room if you wanted to support the act that were just on. Having timed it to get from the main stage to the first floor of the mill where the other one was it was literally just a couple of minutes but that did involve crossing a live road (with high vis wearing festival security playing the part of lollipop man, without themed Bloody-Teardrop lollipops unfortunately, possibly due to legal reasons) and you had to finish your drink as you weren’t allowed to take alcohol between the two rooms (probably also for legal reasons tbh though it could well have just been ruse to sell more IPAs 😊).

 

That was certainly all a bit odd but the festival does host a series of talks and have referred to the struggle of running a small underground community festival with a genuine radical ethos in a rapidly gentrifying area of a city, venue insecurity and other practical effects, something I know even big commercial festivals here struggle with, so I suppose those wee things are part of the crack and give the whole proceedings a bit of character.

So before getting into the bands and days as stuff, just general impressions of the festival itself are incredibly positive. Everything I could have hoped for a small boutique underground with a range of noise adjacent music from chill meditative ambient to the most ridiculously heavy rock and metal to full on fist-pump Bangface-appropriate rave. Just enough of everything to give it a bit of variety so you really appreciate all the individual pieces in context and that whole through line of noise and general playfulness giving it a consistency too. The crowd was, as with ATG, as with Bangface these days and I’m guessing most spaces where the genuinely cool people who get the crack congregate to be fair, politically radical, alternative, queer, feminist, trans-inclusive, friendly, approachable. The vibe checker app on my smartphone was going crazy all weekend

So, first thing I managed to catch on Friday was the last bit of local post-punk outfit Total Luck. Great start to the proceedings as the heaviness and liveliness where what I needed at that point to dust off  the cobwebs and get myself moving after all that travelling. We missed whatever was on next in favour of a bit of exploring and seeing what the layout of the whole thing was. We did get to see Deerhoof, the Friday headliner and something I was particularly looking forwards to. Lively, eclectic guitar based music, constantly transitioning between styles and tying together with J-Pop vocals tying everything together. A complete blast beginning to end.

After that a bit more mooching about the venue before back to the main room for Hey Colossus, who I wasn’t mad familiar with before but knew where right up my street from the second I heard the deep, menacing, Echo(and the Bunnymen)-y gothic drone of the first tune. After that, back to the mill for live analogue face-melt industrial techno 2-piece Giant Swan. Having been suitably pumped by that we finished on the main stage for Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals brining some sick bass-heavy alt hip-­hop.

Tempted as I we were to continue the night either with the small gaggle of sound folk we’d got chatting with in the smoking area or to book up to a gig being out on by one of the extended Hard Crew fam, all the travelling and festivities was catching up with us and we had to call it quits.

Saturday, John stalled at the flat waiting for his partner, who was also experiencing some of the travel woes I’d been subject to the day before. I had a nice afternoon bate’in about on my own through Digbeth doing a bit of exploring on my way to the other-other venue, an art gallery a couple of streets over from the rest of the stuff that hosted the talks, pub quiz and film showings (which I went to) in the afternoons. Digbeth strikes me as like the local Brum version of Camden or the couple of genuinely cool bits off Royal Avenue here, CQ, Union St. etc. Lots of cool wee spots, a complex with an Arcade Bar next to a Boardgame Café, next to a cinema bar, some small independent art galleries and workshops, loads of absolutely phenomenal graff and street art all over the place. I got to see a showcase of music videos and short video art projects from Ipecac, Mike Patton’s own indie label. 

 
First music I caught was the hardcore punk group Blind Eye in The Mill. As it was early in the day the front of the stage was nice and roomy so I had a lot of space to jump about in, which I definitely made the most of. Black’s Myths was a very different energy, lots of drone-doom goodness with a bit of jazz drumming to give you something to move to, no breaks between songs just a constant roll that you can get yourself into properly. After that I saw Ashenspire, who I’d had the pleasure of seeing do their queer anarchist blackened jazz-metal at ATG a couple of weeks ago and once again enjoyed the hell out of before nipping out a little early to get a good spot for Taqbir.

Taqbir are a riot girl group from Morocco in North Africa who perform with the full face Niqāb - for personal safety moreso that religious observation as their radical feminist and queer-inclusive messaging in their songs puts them in the line of fire of conservative groups back home and in general. Punk at its rawest from a circumstance where its ethos is at its most urgent, it had an edge on it that you just don’t get in hardcore in the occident where the innate revolutionary politics are less urgent. They played a short set, as befitting of the genre, but were a definite highlight of the evening. After that I caught a little bit of writer and Oxbow frontman Eugene S Robinson being interviewed in the dealer room by an old festival friend who I’d had a lovely time catching up with for the first time IRL in near ten years. Between that and having to nip back to the gaff for food I missed the only thing I am in retrospect incredibly gutted at missing all weekend, Divide and Dissolve who apparently wrecked the place with one of the nosiest, loudest and generally memorable performances of the weekend.

By the time I got back John and Tara were on site and despite being a bit worse the wear for all the travelling and whatnot we managed to get in the headliners Godflesh on their loudest and most abrasive form I’ve ever had the pleasure of catching. 

We saw DJ Bus Replacement Service who was less weird and more straight up doof than I was expecting, deviating from the relentless techno for a bit of bassline and a censored cut of DJ Assault’s classic Ass and Titties, all while being supported from the sidelines by her partner Surgeon. That was just like a little slice of Bangface right in the middle of the fest, complete with inflatables going off all over the room and general silly fun vibe.

Then Backxwash finishing the main stage. It was actually the inclusion of Backxwash to the lineup for their UK debut that had made me get my arse in gear about committing to going this year. She’s an artist that I’d fallen in love with over the lockdown when I’d had a bit more time to explore and indulge my passion for musical exploration. Aggressively queer alternative hip hop with elements of industrial noise, black metal and samples of back radical thinkers and cultural figures, X, Davis, Nina Simone etc. and contemporary hip-hop rhythms. A very heady and unique brew, brilliantly executed and clearly loving having the opportunity to get over and do their thing in front of such and appreciative crowd.

The Art

Again, opportunities to party after were there but the excitement of the day and being middle aged AF over here had us all calling discretion the better part of valour and calling it for the night.

The Sunday again has us over at the other-other stage after seeing Tara off I the early afternoon for the Pub Quiz, which we stupidly didn’t think to register for early and had to miss. All good though as that meant more time to see around Digbeth for us, John exploring the culinary pleasures of the area and me getting to actually have a crack at the arcade bar and check out some more of the art. 

Seems like it was a good weekend for exploration in Birmingham. There was a big open air complex next door, the courtyard and stage of which could be seen from the smoking area, had a Reggae festival on that day. I jokingly suggested to one of the security staff that they could turn the speaker in that part of the terrace off to let anyone who had a mind to watch. That suggestion was laughed off politely with a little finger wagging, I was being serious tbh.

First act was Jessica Moss, playing a solo with Violin and Loop pedal / vocal looping effects. Very different, very cool, first time seeing something like that myself since Sonorities last year.

After that I got to see a but of the Supersonic Mass, a quasi-religious ceremony lead by an MC with a bannered parade from the Mill to the 7SVN, with a large one with the names of every act to play the festival in the last 20 years at the head and a ritualistic recitation thereof. That was followed by British folk artists Shovel Dance Collective, Silvermoth, Mark Wagner bringing some ritualistic doom and a quick trip back to the gaff to food-up. Me and John had no big plans for the day up to seeing Lankum later on so just hopped room to room exploring. Yeah and remember what I said earlier about the Reggae festival next door, we got lured into the terrace with some sick beats courtesy of the Tropical Wreck collective and guess what, speaker at far corner disconnected and mostly bar and security staff and one or two punters, shortly to include ourselves, vibing to the ragga dancehall across the road 😊 ‘I toul yiz, didn’ I? 

After that bit of excitement back down to see Jessica Moss, the violinist from earlier in the main room this time with Big Brave playing a very different but equally impressive set.

Moving didn’t bear thinking about because shortly it would be time for Sunday headliners, Irish trad artists Lankum. For those who don’t know, and shame on you if you are in that cohort, Lankum were previously a two piece, “Lynched” after the surname of the brothers Darragh and Ian Lynch who were well known in the underground metal scene in Ireland for being the two lads who liked to play random trad songs while partying after shows. Now after a name change considering the possibility of taking off in places where their band name has certain connotations that they’d rather not be associated with, and being joined by multi instrumentalists Cormac MacDiarmada and Radie Peat, the latter of who adds her own incredibly raw and beautiful Sean Nós vocalisation to the mix, are now Lankum. They have been tearing up the local festival and gig circuit at and near home, and now 3 masterful albums deep into the project are getting genuine international notoriety. I have seen them live before and they’re never anything short of special but in this context being both in England and yet in a place long a centre for Irish immigration, so also basically on home turf it was just mind-blowing. There’s something about what they do that touches something incredibly primal like in general but especially if you’re Irish, with noise-y droned out versions of old standards, eg, The Wild Rover – the absolute pinnacle of a cheesy over played trad tune that everyone and their granda knows like the back of their hand through sheer cultural osmosis yet still given such a squalid and real life by them as to sound brand new and fit neatly alongside their own contemporary murder-suicide ballads about the metal health crisis in modern Ireland and living on the breadline in post-crash Dublin. Myself and my mate both had actual hairs on the back of our necks fully up and tears of national pride and many more complex emotions in our eyes all through it.

Now we’d have thought that after that we’d be too emotionally drained to get another real transcendent moment of musical appreciation out of the last couple of hours of the night, and yet… being tired though not quite done yet we made a bate to the Mill for the last time, to grab my coat from the cloak room and stick our heads around the door if only to check out the last artists on the second stage. ‘Tis as well we did for that turned out to be an absolutely blinding alt hip hop crew Algiers. This was a two piece with the beats having a particularly 80s vintage retro-synthwave tip to them and and MC with a really interesting range including blues-y sing-rapping, Saul Williams-esque lyricism and politically conscious bars. Some of it really banged too, like proper rave breaks.

Re-invigorated we did get down for Avalanche Kaito, lively mathy Afro rock, Zappa-esque compositional weirdness, traditional West-African instrumentation, Griot vocals and a bit of call-response. We were lucky enough to bump into some of the incredibly cool folks we’d got chatting to on the Friday on the dancefloor too and it was a great end to the night and the event.

Overall, as I hope I’ve been able to convey here, I had the absolute time of it. For reasons I’ll not get into, this has been a tough year all round, the general shittyness of the weather over the summer since the start of July being only the least among many things to complain of. So this was a well deserved bit of release and a chance to engage with communities and spaces that are important to me and are part of what helps feed the soul. Glad I got there at last and I hope that this small offering of my efforts can help feed back into it a little. I’d love to get back maybe as a regular part of my yearly cycle of things but time will tell how able I am for that in the future.

I will also note that this weekend was also when the first part of the new Adventure Time spin off dropped and I had been looking forwards to getting into that when I got back, which I did and was all I could have hoped a continuation of one of my absolute favourite things ever with the complexity tuned up just a little and now aimed at a more self consciously adult audience who’d grew up with the series over the last decade could ever be. So I’ve had my mind-hole well fed to the point of being stuffed and satisfied and feel a bit more ready for whatever this increasingly shaky and unpredictable future we all find ourselves in may hold. You can’t ask more from a long weekend than that really, can you?

 

My Tracks of the year 2011 (part 2)

This is Part 2 where i look at some of the folky and rocky stuff i've been listening to over the last year, for part one and a general explanation of what this is about see:

http://cmcv-lifeatthesharpend.blogspot.com/2012/01/my-tracks-of-year-2011-part-1.html

Alison Kraus and Union Station - Dust Bowl Children

This is some proper ye-ha music. Bluegrass and the sort of pan European folk tradition that this music harks back to is the original dance music. Back in the day before raves they had barn dances, ceilis or whatever it was called in the native language and they got fucked on homemade drink and raved to the fastest danciest shit they could beat out on their acoustic instruments. I actually think that this track and the one following has more in common with the stuff in the next two parts than anything in the first two. I like this track particularly because it has a bit of soul to it and the vocals from Dan “I actually sang all that stuff in O Brother Whereart Thou” Tyminski give it a real bit of depth. I also find it interesting that in the midst of a global economic crisis we’re getting a revival in the musical aesthetic of the great Depression years, something that is explicitly referenced in the lyrics of the verse from the original version of this song that wasn’t used in this one.

Cave Singers – Dancing on Our Graves

A nice stompy marching beat around which everything else builds, then drops and builds again then the lows drop out and come back in etc. You see, this shit was the techno of its day. Hmm, maybe this year i’ll teach myself how to use Ableton just so I can make a whole album of electronic remixes of this stuff just to prove the point. Anyway, I don’t know much about the band, just found this on a random spotify adventure (which is what i call it when i surf through spotify using the related artists tabs in the right hand corner) loved it and a few of their other tracks and its stuck since.

Lightning Dust – Listened On

Ah, what can I say about this lovely smooth bit of psychedelic rock. It’s just so chilled and easy, makes me wish I could still get stoned so I could just spark up, bang this on in a loop and mellow out. It’s so sweet and warm it just takes you away. I love the vocals too, they have a kind of strength to them and carry a lot of emotion very easily. It’s so hazy and evocative I feel like i’m living someone else’s life for a few minutes when I’m listening to it, a strange nostalgia for things that never happened.

Keli Ali – The Savages

Apparently this girl is at the forefront of a gothic neo-folk revival. I should hope so, this is absolutely amazing. Reminds me of pre-modern folk music, but also a little bit of Forever Autumn from The War of the Worlds (which I love btw. I used to rinse it out after I stopped toking and dedicate it to the hashish I could no longer smoke). I know that this is girly as hell but its all so lyrical and dark, there’s a real intelligence in the lyrics and that wee girl has some pipes on her to carry so much in the precise and controlled way she sings. I just like the dissonance between how old it sounds and how modern its sensibilities are. It has the chilled out-edness of the trip hop that Keli Ali comes from (she used to be in Sneaker Pimps) and that dark gothic sound. Nice.

Sebadoh – On Fire (acoustic)
Ah the wonders of the internet, you can catch up with half remembered obscure shit you heard about when you were a kid but never had the connections or the money to pursue back before you had access to literally everything. I vaguely recall reading about Sebadoh in a magazine that my cousin Roisin left in our house when she was a student and I was a mere first or second year at Lagan which was a student’s special and was sort of my awakening to the adult world. More on that issue of DV8 another time maybe, but I recall reading about this band and thinking they sounded class way back in the early 90s when they were going. Something put this into my head recently and I started looking for them online. I found a lot of their stuff and it seems like my nascent musical instincts were right, they were actually quite good, sort of came up through the same rock scene as REM and Dinosaur Jr. but were not quite as big, and definitely didn’t make much of an impact on this side of the Atlantic. I don’t listen to a lot of indie anymore, actually finding these guys and listening to Pulp doing the festivals again this year and still sounding awesome made me wonder if i wasn’t missing out so I went on a trawl through the 90s indie scene on Spotify and I concluded that with the exception of Mercury Rev and a few individual tracks here and there, I was quite right to dismiss the whole thing as shit and that actually Oasis were damn lucky to do as well as they did.

All the rest of it notwithstanding, these guys were genuinely special and this track in particular is fucking cool. They could go from really nice stuff like this to harsh experimental tracks like monochrome set at their most artsy and obtuse. Great stuff but i don’t know why they were never bigger over here but there you go.

RSAG – Stick To Your line
1-02 Stick To Your Line by Rarely Seen Above Ground
I did make it to a few good festivals this year but i didn’t go to any of the big ones. I generally don’t go to any of those ones, I’m way to much of a closet hipster for that shit and it’s expensive as fuck. I probably ought to have gone to Electric Picnic though, from what I saw of this years it looked class, not even for the headliners but for all the other stuff and the small up-coming acts playing you could have had a blast without even seeing any of the big names. I was torturing myself by looking at the line up for this years when it was just about to happen and when i had no hope of getting a ticket when I saw these guys, a new band from down south that happen to sound like Joy Division, Pere Ubu and all that other post-punk new wave-y shit that I like. I actually think I did a double take when I heard this track, it just sounds so much like something from that era. It sounds fresh too, like as I’ve said a few times I don’t listen to a lot of indie but this sounds different to anything else at the minute, as much as it’s a little derivative of some earlier stuff, its all good stuff that he’s riffing off and nobody else right now seems to be tapping that particular seem.

Ice Age – Collapse

I heard about these guys in an article from the magazine of the rouge IS section over in the states. Basically the jist was that all the stuff coming up and being bigged up by Pitchfork was politically suspect and wouldn’t it be nicer if the new music that was emerging during the crisis had a more overtly lefty political content. Personally as a member of the Irish SWP i found the whole thing cringe inducing. You can’t just damn music based on its perceived political content, i hate people on the left getting on like that about music, the first thing I did when i read the article was listen to the two acts they were criticising on Spotify. And as it turns out they were actually quite wrong about Iceage. I can see why they were worried about the band possibly having some far right affiliation, but there is nothing in the actual music or the lyrics of the songs that actually supports such the idea. The worst you could say is that they’re a-political. The lyrics have no real reason to them, they’re just evocative words that frame and support the music with no meaning of their own. The music itself is really good though, it’s all done in a raspy raucous style, kind of libertines rough with harsher stuff coming in and most of the songs come in at under two and a half minutes, as it should be. It has a real energy to it too. No filler, not even on individual tracks, how often can you say that? Really good accomplished stuff considering how young these lads are. As for their political affiliation, one ill advised Death In June tattoo notwithstanding (though i find all that 3rd position queerism stuff too idiosyncratic to be taken seriously), they have toured with some quite serious antifa affiliated punk bands who wouldn’t have them anywhere near them if they truly believed they were crypto-fascists. It’s that sort of detail you want to actually look at when you’re talking about a musical acts politics rather than sifting through their actually meaningless lyrics looking for clues.

Foetus – Time Marches On

Apparently Foetus are supposed to be an industrial band. I dunno, they neither look nor sound that industrial-y to me (depending on how you define what industrial is, which is probably a topic for a different blog) I mean this has pianos, swooping orchestral violins and shit in it. And yet, they get remixed by Ambassador 21 (this actual track come to think of it) and I’ve heard Matt ‘Caustic’ Fanale refer to them as an industrial band and he should know since he’s been near single handedly redefining what industrial is for the last couple of years. It’s really idiosyncratic industrial at least.

Whatever it is this is the very definition of pumpin’. It has so much life and fun in it and it bangs like a shithouse door in a hurricane. You can dance your wee dick off to it. I have done, frequently. Class tune.

Anyway, on that note I’m going to leave it. join me next time when I look at some of the electronic I was listening to this year, seven absolute bangers from a couple of different styles of electronica.