The inner-city Birmingham suburb of Digbeth, with its happy mish-mash of architectural styles, its long and stubborn resistance to the more dehumanising excesses of gentrification, its proud industrial heritage and its longstanding reputation as the city’s creative hub, is the perfect home for a festival like Supersonic. The impressive and forbidding repetition of the massive railway arches that run parallel to the area’s lively main drag have their natural echo in the heaviness and the minimalism that are the hallmarks of much contemporary experimental music. Heavy and experimental are the watchwords for Supersonic, but this is a festival concerned less with genre boundaries than with providing a space where undiluted creativity is allowed to run amok. It has been running since 2003, and is one of the most successful small festivals in the country. It is also, arguably, the best. This is down to a combination of openness and expert curation (as well as a great location and some super little venues).
In terms of live acts, Supersonic never seems to put a foot wrong. Standout names on this year’s Friday and Saturday programmes include Water Damage, Moin, Big Special, Rún, Witch Club Satan and Buñuel. Sunday has traditionally been the folkier day (though as we would soon learn, the heaviness and the experimentation are still, thankfully, dialled up to the max), and with this year’s Sunday lineup featuring some of KLOF’s favourite acts, we decided to go along for the ride.
Bridget Hayden and the Apparitions’ set is similar to the one they performed on the Walled Garden stage at a sun-soaked Green Man festival a couple of weeks ago – mostly well-known traditional ballads from their recent album Cold Blows the Rain like Blackwater Side, She Moved Through the Fayre, When I Was In My Prime and Let No Man Steal Your Thyme – but it hits different in the darkened confines of the XOYO, an offshoot of the much-loved Islington venue. The place has a well-maintained veneer of seediness, with vintage neon and staircases you can lurk in. Hayden’s singing, expansive in the Welsh sunlight, becomes almost chillingly intimate in the dinge of a Digbeth nightclub. You soon forget that it’s early afternoon, and still technically summer. The room buzzes and creaks with Sam McLoughlin’s harmonium and Dan Bridgwood-Hill’s violin, and, if you close your eyes, it doesn’t take much to imagine the bleak and beautiful moorland that surrounds Hayden’s hometown of Todmorden. (A brief sidenote: Todmorden’s name was once conjectured to be derived from both the German and French words for death. Somehow fitting).
At the O2 Institute, a couple of minutes down the road, it’s the turn of venerable American drone-folk-blues-rock-free jazz experimental collective Jackie-O Motherfucker. They’ve been doing it for over thirty years now, pre-dating and inspiring some of the freakier freak folk acts that started appearing at around the turn of the century. These days they are a five-piece – three guitarists, a keyboard player and a drummer – headed up by founder Tom Greenwood. The front half of the set is beatless and pleasingly meandering. Songs like Nightingale and Rockaway are thickened by the three guitars that wander around each other and form layers of sound, soft and textile-like, augmented by the wail and drone of the keyboard. Then things take a turn for the spikier. For a while, they sound as if Einstürzende Neubauten got lost on some desert highway under the influence of some ill-advised mushrooms. Then you realise drummer Sparrow Flint has manifested from somewhere and things get feistier, not to mention Faustier, as a glorious cover of Kevin Ayers’ Decadence descends into sheets of thrum and thrash and wonderful, engulfing noise. It’s great to have them back on these shores. Don’t leave it so long next time, guys.
Back at XOYO, Hedgling turn the experimentation up a notch. Usually a duo of Natalia Beylis (electronics) and Willie Stewart (drums – specifically the floor tom), here they are joined by Aibhe Nic Oireachtaigh on viola (image below). For anyone coming to Hedgling through Beylis’s usually subtle approach to musique concrete, field recording and ambience, this one might come as a bit of a shock. Stewart’s technique seems to be all about aggressively introducing one piece of percussive hardware to another. Cymbals, springs and metal rods are scraped and struck against the tom, which at one point almost loses a leg. The sound of Stewart discarding this or that bit of kit becomes as much a part of the piece as the intentional acts. Beylis coaxes squeals and blips and dissonance out of her various toys, which include a wired-up cowbell and a sewing machine that sounds like an anxious woodpecker. There is none of the hushed reverence that usually accompanies improvisatory sound art; instead, we get a finale which is genuinely, immodestly, insanely heavy, as Stewart taps into a pounding, primal rhythm and Beylis goes to town on her equipment like a rock star in the midst of a guitar-wrecking solo. It’s surprising, refreshing and absolutely brilliant.
XOYO is also host to some of the day’s quieter moments. There’s a solo set from Six Organs of Admittance, in which Ben Chasny’s electric guitar is its usual combination of wild and discursive as he wends his hexadic way through a couple of medleys, as well as Jade Like Wine, A Thousand Birds and a clutch of other pieces from his lengthy back catalogue. Like Jackie-O Motherfucker, Chasny has been around since the dawn of New Weird America (he last appeared at Supersonic in 2012), and the quality of his output remains undiminished. Here, shorn of the drones and chimes that decorate much of his recorded work, he attains a rare intimacy.
Equally intimate is Cinder Well, aka Amelia Baker, whose electric and slightly gothic neo-folk – full of talking birds and strange omens – brings an almost cathedral-like atmosphere to the venue. She opens with the wonderful Two Heads, Grey Mare – the first track on her 2023 album Cadence – and immediately, the room is hushed. A Scorched Lament is loaded with apocalyptic rapture, and the two traditional songs at the core of the set achieve an eerie closeness. She finishes with the cryptic and slow-burning Crow, her voice clear and her guitar crisp.
In between, we are treated to a rooftop performance by Rochdale ballad singer Jennifer Reid. Reid sings unaccompanied, and often without a mic, and today she has to contend with a massive soundsystem pumping out incredibly loud dancehall and soca tunes at the Boxout festival just across the road. But she is a powerful performer, as well as a warm and funny one. She warms up with Let No Man Steal Your Thyme, then leads us through a series of songs with their roots in the textile industry, most composed in the dialects of Failsworth or Salford or Rochdale. It’s an education, but always an entertaining one, and when you consider that these songs would have originally been sung against the backdrop of industrial noise, today’s external sounds start to seem less important.
Earlier, back at the larger venue, KLOF favourites Poor Creature delivered a high-quality set of their distinctive blend of folk, ambient drone and post-rock dynamics. Traditional tracks like Adieu Lovely Erin (on which Cormac MacDiarmada manages to play a violin and a viola simultaneously, the instruments sat like a pair of children, one on each knee) and Bury Me Not rub shoulders with Hank Williams’ Cold Cold Heart and an emotion-soaked cover of Philomena Begley and Ray Lynam’s country and Irish classic The Whole Town Knows. John Dermody’s drumming is muscular and propulsive, and Ruth Clinton’s voice is as sharp and bright as diamonds. Between songs, she is an engaging presence, detailing the perils of getting a theremin through the security checks at Dublin airport and trying to convince the audience that ‘it’s not necrophilia if it’s with a ghost.’
Rich(ard) Dawson was always likely to be a highlight of the day, and he does not disappoint. As is customary, he begins with an ear-grabbing a cappella ballad of his own composition, the richly detailed and compassionate Almsgiver, before being joined on stage by drummer Andrew Cheetham for a crowd-pleasing set of largely recent material. There are a few songs from this year’s End of the Middle, as well as a spirited performance of live favourite Jogging, which the pair slam through like a White Stripes-esque power duo. Dawson’s riffing is heavy and minimal, and the song’s ending produces perhaps the biggest cheer of the day, due in no small part to him changing the lyric to a plea for medical aid in Palestine.
He also provides a warm tribute to recently departed songwriter Michael Hurley in the form of a stirring cover of Hurley’s Wildgeeses. The set finishes with the thrashing, squalling, prog-metal opus Black Triangle, which concludes with Dawson dropping to his knees and milking five minutes of heavy feedback out of his guitar, the most unexpected of rock gods. The noise continues, feeding back into infinity, after both musicians have vacated the stage.
But maybe the most astonishing set comes late in the day. Funeral Folk is the project of Swedish duo Sara Parkman (vocals, violin) and Maria W Horn (vocals, electronics, bass), joined on stage by guitarist Mats Erlandsson. Horn and Parkman appear in traditional costume, half-obscured by the dim, reddened stage lighting. The gothic theatricality of the setting is more than matched by the music: droning, heavy-as-lead doom folk, occult whisperings, energetic passages of violin noise, spoken-word incantations, ecclesiastical dirges, and moments of ecstatic lightness. Parkman’s vocals range from the delicate and birdlike to elemental, possessed screams. The breakdown from melodic stability to pure grief-ridden catharsis in Kyrie is simply one of the most intense musical experiences I have ever experienced. Parkman writhes and convulses, absolutely invested in the moment that she and her collaborators have created. For the closing Memento Mori, the band invites the audience to join them with a stirring, spiralling, wordless hum, which the crowd takes up and continues as the performers leave the stage: a moment of solidarity and personal connection from a surprising source. In spite of its subject of death and mourning, Funeral Folk is utterly life-affirming.
After such a completely engaging, emotionally draining performance, it takes some effort of will to return to XOYO for the festival’s closing act, The Bug and Warrior Queen. But guess what? It’s more than worth the walk. The pair provide wall-to-wall bangers: dancehall, ragga, grimy beats and thick slugs of bass, making sure the night – and the festival – ends on a high, a bold exclamation mark rather than a full stop. On this evidence, Supersonic can claim to be not just the best small festival in the country, but the best of any size. We may have only been there for a day, but what a day it was.
A huge thanks to Catherine Dineley, Jim Brindley and Joe Singh @snaprockandpop for the excellent photos.
Website: https://supersonicfestival.com/
