Friday 12 June – Vivid Projects 18:00pm

Diatribes are a Geneva based duo comprising Cyril Bondi and d’incise. They perform percussion, found objects and live electronics. Their work is an exploration of simplification and rational rituality, formed by strict sonic or structural principles. Typically their music features highly detailed textures, repeated gestures, soft tones, febrile pulses and acoustic hyper-sensibility.

The duo is currently presenting two new pieces based on the deconstruction of old Jamaican dub tunes, in an attempt to reinterpret this musical heritage and some of its trade marks in an very conceptual, electroacoustic and minimalist way.

soundkitchenuk.org

Dirty Electronics will be joined by long-term collaborator Nicholas Bullen (Napalm Death/Scorn) for a set featuring works from Dirty Electronics’ new album released on Mute Records, and pieces for the Supersonic commissioned Horn & Bells sound object. Over the last decade, John Richards (Dirty Electronics) and Bullen have worked together on numerous projects from releasing music as Black Galaxy to co-organising Fluxus events. Bullen has also written several performance pieces for the Dirty Electronics Ensemble.
www.dirtyelectronics.org

Wednesday to Saturday 12–5pm
86 Heath Mill Lane, Birmingham, B9 4AR

In the main space ‘Silks’, Samara Scott’s first solo – show in a public gallery, rips up and ruptures the floor to create an irrepressible, erotic topography of consumer products. Her exotically prosaic worlds of poured and pooled misused materials – household chemicals, soft drinks, toilet paper, scented waxes, noodles, eye shadow and toothpaste – cascade, smear and mould into an archipelago of voids cut into the gallery’s concrete floor.

In the second gallery Roger Coward re-visits his 1975 Artist Placement Group project, which focused on Small Heath, presenting the exhibition ‘YOU AND ME HERE WE ARE’, which includes the artist’s film ‘The Most Smallest Heath in the Spaghetti Junction’ and a selection of archive materials.

Eastside Projects is a free public gallery in Digbeth that is being imagined and organized by artists, in partnership with Birmingham City University.

www.eastsideprojects.org
.

STEWART EASTON: THE NEXT VERSE
A3 Project Space | Unit A3 2 Bowyer Street, Digbeth, Birmingham, B10 0SA
Sat & Sun – Sat 13 June & Sun 14 June, 12pm – 5pm

Breaking the traditional boundaries of craft, Stewart Easton’s latest work, The Next Verse, fuses together hand embroidery, sonic art and music.

Collaborating with sound artist, Gawain Hewitt, and musician Michael Tanner (Plinth, United Bible Studies), Stuart’s stitch work forms a meter square of interactive embroidery that follows the lifecycle of a fictional family. The major plot lines of The Next Verse are hand stitched by Stuart using conductive thread and a soundtrack composed by Michael is triggered by touch, each person creating their unique soundscape. Stuart will also be developing a site specific wall drawing in the gallery during the exhibition.

Stewart Easton is a visual storyteller based in London who works in thread, ink, paint and digital. www.stewarteaston.net

A3 Project Space is an art venue in Digbeth run by Trevor Pitt, who curates an evolving programme of projects, exhibitions and events.
www.a3projectspace.org

Please note that A3 Project Space is in a slightly different location to the other organisations taking part in Digbeth Delights; it is not part of Minerva Works but is only a short stroll away.

Sunday 14 June – 12.00 – 17.00
admission free
Minerva Works, 158 Fazeley Street, Digbeth, Birmingham, B5 5RT

Start your Supersonic Sunday at Minerva Works. A host of Birmingham’s best independent spaces present an afternoon of avant-garde performances, workshops and talks. Expect brutalist composition, contemporary improvisation, punk protest art and poetic robotics.

DISSIDENTS AND DREAMERS: ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN ART FROM THE EAST AND WEST
Centrala Gallery / Unit 3
Gee Vaucher/ Oskar Kasperek /Radosław Włodarski

Centrala Gallery presents a selection of punk protest art and documents, produced before the fall of the Iron Curtain from the East and West, including works by Gee Vaucher, Oscar Kasperek and Radosław Włodarski. Gee Vaucher’s iconic imagery made with Anarcho-punk band, Crass, was inspirational to the ‘protest art’ of the 1980s and still resonates today. Vaucher has always seen her work as a tool for social change.
From the same period but on the other side of Europe and under a different political system, Oscar Kasperek’s work is equally provocative and thoughtful, from his portraits of fellow prisoners, to his use of stamps, which leave small traces in the environment to present a dialogue with the surrounding world. In conjunction with the exhibition, Centrala Café will be presenting the contemporary work of Radosław Włodarski.
14.30 -16.00 Talk
Centrala will host a talk with artists Gee Vaucher, Oskar Kasperek and Nic Bullen, discussing their experiences in punk counter-cultural production. Chaired by John Robb, editor of Louder Than War.

[TO]FASHIONFISSIONFUSION – TADAS STALYGA
AND MATTHEW SPRINGER
Home For Waifs And Strays / Unit 9

[to]fashionfissionfusion is a flux of bodies, soundscapes, projections and languages. It is a meeting point for the cinematic, theatrical and performative. It can be seen as performance (or, in a sense, a happening) as performers negotiate the present moment, which enters the work and forms its backbone. It can be seen as theatre, but not one where the border between the performer and the audience is reinforced, where the lines, movements and sensibilities are rehearsed beforehand. It can be seen as cinema, but without a priori script, narrative or conclusion; one where editing, filming, acting, soundscape, narration happens simultaneously. There are no shots, actions or sounds which are unfit; knowing, not knowing, clarity and confusion trade places.
www.hfwas.co.uk

FIZZLE PRESENT REACT
Stryx / Unit 13
An exciting programme drawn from the best of Birmingham’s thriving improvised music scene. Featuring British improv legends alongside talented young musicians making their mark on the national circuit, expect cutting-edge electronics, immersive string duets and acoustic free jazz at its best.
www.stryx.co.uk

SARAH ANGLISS, TRACE: MUSIC AND POETIC ROBOTICS
JOHN CAGE: VARIATIONS VII (SCREENING)
Vivid Projects / Unit 16
In this short performance devised and presented by Sarah Angliss (composer and roboticist) and Emma Kilbey (actor), breaths, gestures and other human actions seem to be echoed in changes to lamps, cups and other objects. You can choose to observe these events as they unfold, or influence them further by hooking yourself up to the set.

In 1966, ten New York artists and thirty engineers and scientists collaborated on a series of innovative dance, music, and theatre performances, 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering. The ten artists included John Cage, whose Variations VII was the next to last in his series of indeter- minate works begun in 1958, and which made increasing use of electronic equipment and systems to capture and manipulate sounds present at the time of the performance. Don’t miss your chance to see this rare and historical film, consisting of archival footage of the performance and documentary interviews.

Vivid Projects is a collaborative agency and project space, exploring all forms of media arts practice.
www.vividprojects.org.uk

BEND YOUR TARMAC THROUGH MY EARS:
HONOR GAVIN PERFORMANCE AND ARTIST TALK WITH AIDEEN DORAN
Grand Union / Unit 19
Musician and writer, Honor Gavin, talks to artist, Aideen Doran, about their shared interest in Birmingham’s architecture and the influence it has had on their artistic endeavours.
They will talk from within the setting of Im Bau, an experimental research space devised by artist Aideen Doran. Im Bau brings together Aideen’s research on Birmingham as a space for artistic, economic and ideological production.

The talk will be followed by Honor Gavin performing sounds from Yes Manzoni, a sonic celebration of Birmingham’s twentieth century urban transformations.
Grand Union is a gallery and artists’ studios that supports the development of artists and curators through provision of high quality work space and an experimental programme of free exhibitions and events.
www.grand-union.org.uk

Ela Orleans (HB Recordings, Parental Guidance) is a Polish musician now based in Glasgow, UK. She was a member of pop collagists Hassle Hound, has played with various luminaries of the New York experimental and noise scenes and is a composer for the screen and theatre. Over the course of Orleans’ music career, her tagline and brief description for her music has always been “Movies for Ears”. In the work Orleans pushes her pastoral pop roots into more cinematic terrain, experimenting with carefully considered sound art segments, complex electronic textures and orchestral flourishes.

“She is Moondogmatic in her intransigent commitment to producing compositions of subtlety and incongruent beauty. These are polysemous confections which make you feel that you are listening to pop music for the first time again”. Time Out NY

Birmigham duo Steve Alcock and Andy Porteous take retro-futurist disco as a starting point, which we think is a pretty great beginning for anything, frankly. Their sound develops from there into a unique fusion of Electro, House, Balearic and Kosmiche. A couple of rubber lamb masks are the proverbial icing on the cake for a fun trip for all.
www.soundcloud.com/free-school

An exhibition of new works responding to innovations in early music technology.

Monday 1 – Sunday 14 June | open 10:00 – 17:00 daily | admission free

Millennium Point, Curzon Street, Birmingham, B4 7XE
www.millenniumpoint.org.uk

The mechanisation of sound creation began as soon as technology allowed it. In the 19th century, mechanical musical instruments such as barrel organs, symphonions, orchestrions, euterpeons and miniature music boxes proliferated. Equally marvelled at and loathed for their tinny, repetitive reproductions of classical pieces and show-tunes, these programmable machines can be seen as the ancestors of today’s electronic and digital instruments. Birmingham Museums’ collection of ornately decorated mechanical instruments, on display in the All Ears exhibition, reflects on the transition of music from real-time, human generated sound to the myriad ways in which technology shapes how we produce and consume music today.

Optikit  – Owl Project
www.owlproject.com/

Owl Project are combining ideas from the Symphonium music boxes in the museum collection, with more experimental techniques of optical sound developed in Russia during the early 20th century, such as the Variaphone and the ANS Synthesiser.

The Symphonium was very fixed in its musical remit. The notes were set to a Western scale and the sequences on metal disks, which were hard to change. In response, we are developing an unfolding music box that can be reconfigured in a multitude of ways. Assembled from a bespoke kit of paper discs, synth modules, motors and fixings, the Optikit will generate endlessly changing beats and rhythms throughout Supersonic Festival.

Owl Project is a collaborative group of artists, Simon Blackmore, Antony Hall and Steve Symons. Drawing on influences such as 70’s synthesiser culture, DIY woodworking and current digital crafts, they work with wood and electronics to create music making machines, interfaces and objects.

New Automatic Party Organ
Sarah Angliss Colin Uttley + Eve Warren
www.sarahangliss.com

This five-octave pipe organ has been designed as an automatic party instrument. People can call up tunes by placing RFID-tagged request cards on the lid. The pipes come from two scrapped Welsh chapel organs. They’ve been stripped, rewaxed and regilded, then arranged in an asymmetric sweep that’s reflected in the shape of the new windchest (the box of air under the pipes). The paintwork is inspired by an 18th century harpsichord cabinet but uses soundwaves as a decorative motif. The air inlet, for example, is cut in the shape of a wavefront.

Sarah Angliss is an award winning composer, roboticist and historian of sound whose music reflects her fascination with European folklore and long-forgotten machines. In performance, Sarah mixes theremin, saw and ancient instruments with live electronics, with an ensemble of musical automata of her own design and construction.

Amplification
MortonUnderwood
www.mortonunderwood.co.uk

Amplification is a stereo acoustic amplification system, developed to encourage deep listening to environmental sounds within a space. Users of the system can augment their listening through two large ear trumpets. They will also be able to adjust the stereo field of what they can hear by swivelling each horn.

MortonUnderwood were struck by the developers’ efforts to amplify the sound output of the music machines on display in the museum collection. In a world where we can easily dial in more electronic amplification, many of the innovative approaches seen in the collection are now obsolete. Through Amplification, MortonUnderwood hope to highlight the beauty of passive, acoustic amplification systems.

MortonUnderwood is a musical instrument design and sound art duo made up of equal parts David Morton and Sam Underwood. to amplify the sound output Their work mainly explores acoustic systems and sub-bass.

Oak Apple Orchestra
Paul Gittins
www.modernshadows.com/oak-apple-orchestra.html

A collection of instruments and objects played by clock motors. Oak apples, attached to the secondhand, hit the strings at two second intervals and then strike and fall back. Each instrument has several clock motors, positioned to select specific notes. This selection then repeats to create an endless rhythm. The structure of intervals between the notes is essentially random, producing an infinite number of variations, and the clock motors can be switched on and off using a bluetooth control, changing the shape of the rhythm. The instruments produce a continual stream of minimal music with a two second beat.

Paul Gittins works with a variety of media, producing interactive shadow shows with screens of paper pixels, in theatres and outdoor festivals. He is currently developing an orchestra of self playing instruments that will be attached to trees in woodland locations.

All Ears is a Millennium Point Trust commission, curated by Capsule and delivered in partnership with Birmingham Museums Trust. The exhibition is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

www.millenniumpoint.org.uk

Our buddies, Supernormal host a DIY Paper Turntable Workshop to test your new vinyl purchases from Supersonic’s Market Place. Come along to learn how to make your own portable, manually spun turntable and take it away with you. Materials provided – just bring records! Supernormal folk can also be found playing some tunes from their upcoming music programme and other obscurities over the weekend.

www.supernormalfestival.co.uk

Bunny is an artist, illustrator and obsessive fanatic, raised in Birmingham and currently based in Tokyo, Japan. Her work is heavily inspired by popular culture and fanaticism, with recurring themes including music, teen angst, pro wrestling, animals and idols. Previous collaborations with Capsule include exhibitions, t-shirt designs and infamous trading card sales at Supersonic 2009, 2010 & 2012, as well as creating the ‘Home of Metal’ project family tree. Bunny returns to the festival selling prints, zines, badges and stickers in addition to vintage trading cards, cult memorabilia and treasures from Japan.

www.bunnybissouxart.com

Roger Clarke, founder and creator of the Record Player Orchestra, will lead a workshop that will give you the opportunity to experiment with the record player as an instrument. Engagement with the stylus’s physical placement on the vinyl is key and no prior skill or expertise is needed. By discovering how to play the record player, participants can start to understand the qualities and particularities of this instrument, what kind of playing might be possible and what might be more problematic.

recordplayerorchestra.com

The Record Player Orchestra are brought to you in partnership with A3 Projects Space. Based in Digbeth, Birmingham A3 supports contemporary artists to develop their work and their relationships with audiences.

a3projectspace.org/

Rope Press, [RHP] CDRs

Rope Press is the home for independent printing and publishing in Central England. Following a residency at Rope Press, artist and curator, Ryan Hughes, presents a performance-lecture on the subject of production and distribution within the digital age. Ryan works under the banner [RHP] CDRs, a limited edition record label and research unit. He will discuss his work, incorporating examples of music he has produced or released via [RHP] CDRs.

www.rhpcdrs.wordpress.com

John Doran is celebrating the publication of his first book, Jolly Lad, by reading passages from the book and also performing various incantations and rituals concerning black holes, the dismemberment of Dapper Laughs, ghosts and Birmingham bus timetables.

“This is not a ‘my drink and drug hell’ kind of book for several reasons – the main one being that I had, for the most part, had a really good time drinking. True, a handful of pretty appalling things have happened to me and some people that I know or used to know over the years. But I have, for the most part, left them out of this book as they are not illuminating, not edifying and in some cases concern other people who aren’t here to consent to their appearance. Instead this book concentrates on what you face after the drink and the drugs have gone.”

Celebrating Supersonic’s occupancy of South & City College Birmingham, local historian Ben imagines what would feature on the syllabus and what would be created in the workshops were Capsule to become permanent vocational fixture here. This visionary academy excels in Fine and Applied Skulpture, intricately crafted by students under the tutelage of Digbeth’s skilled precision engineers, to striking effect. Even with a skeleton staff, the course promises to transform even the least promising bonehead to fully qualified artisan. That is, if students are prepared to bone up: dead heads need not apply.

‘The florid filigree reanimates the skulls from grotesque to elegant and the results are showcased in display cabinets to attract trade and inspire commissions. The college is keen to boast the ancient traditions of Digbeth: the skills, customs, rituals and bone-lore unique to the area. From here, they are exported around the world to collectors of anthropological oddities and industrial wonders. This perpetuates the legacy of the craft and ensures that it never dies out.…’ Skulls Out Forever!

Dissenters and Dreamers at Centrala, a new multifunctional space in Minerva Works run by PEA, it’s a gallery, café and venue with a particular focus on Central and Eastern European culture. Centrala Space presents an Exhibition of Anti Authoritarian Protest Art and Music from the East and West.  This particular exhibition is a selection of Punk protest art  and documents produced before the fall of the Iron Curtain from the East and West, including works by Gee Vaucher and Oscar Kasperek. Gee Vaucher’s iconic imagery made with Anarcho-punk band Crass was inspirational to the ‘protest art’ of the 1980s and still resonates today. From the same period but on the other side of Europe Oscar Kasperek’s work was equally provocative.

Gee will be in conversation with Nic Bullen, founding member of Napalm Death as part of Digbeth Delights on Sunday 14 June.

Ben will be giving a talk on the Hexadic System and how it relates to the 13th century monk Ramon LLull. Llull’s influence on serial and combinatorial thought, poetics and hermeticism will be addressed. In addition he will be demonstrating the system in a dual with fellow guitarist Rick Tomlinson of Voice of the Seven Thunders fame – not to be missed!

Over the last two years, Ben has assembled a comprehensive system of musical composition. Designed to free sound and language from rational order and replace calculation with indeterminacy, THE HEXADIC SYSTEM is a catalyst to extinguish patterns and generate new means of chord progressions and choices.

THE SYSTEM builds all of the tonal fields, chord changes, scales, and lyrics on this record, creating the framework for the songs with which the musicians engage. Yet THE SYSTEM is open; within the framework,
 Chasny’s own personal aesthetics—such as the production mode of loud guitars, the order of songs, the editing of length—were all conscious decisions made to communicate the pieces. The ex- act same combinatorial patterns used on this record can create infinite results, depending on the choices of the individual. Ben’s years of study have produced an operational agent that has not only built all the songs on Hexadic but is also a system anyone can use to restructure their ways of habit.

Supersonic is partnering with Faber Social to present acclaimed author Rob Chapman talking about his new book Psychedelia and Other Colours, that explores in crystalline detail the history, precedents and cultural impact of LSD. From the earliest experiments in painting with light and immersive environments to the thriving avant- garde scene that existed in San Francisco even before the Grateful Dead and the Fillmore Auditorium. In the UK, he documents an entirely different history, and one that has never been told before. It has its roots in fairy tales and fairgrounds, the music hall and the dead of Flanders fields, in the Festival of Britain and that peculiarly British strand of surrealism that culminated in the Magical Mystery Tour. Sitars and Sergeant Pepper, surfadelica and the Soft Machine, light shows and love-ins – the mind-expanding effects of acid were to redefine popular culture as we know it. Psychedelia and Other Colours documents these utopian reverberations – and the dark side of their moon – in a perfect portrait.

Angharad Davies is a violinist, improviser and composer. She’s a specialist in the art of ‘preparing’ her violin, adding objects or materials to it to extend its sound making properties.

Angharad has performed at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, BBC Proms,  is an associate artist at Cafe Oto and has played live with Tony Conrad in the Turbine Room at the Tate Modern. She has collaborated extensively with artists from around the world, including Kazuko Hohki, Tisha Mukarji, Lina Lapelyte, Dominic Lash, Rie Nakajima and Julia Eckhardt.

Listen to an extract from her piece, ‘Pizz, Nail File and Fingers Study’:

It’s a collaboration that simply cannot be understated. Dylan Carlson and Kevin Martin are both long established figures presiding over the radical fringes of heavy music, holding the attention of curious minds and audiences for over twenty years worldwide. Carlson, the mainstay of Seattle’s Earth, has created a volume of daring work that originates in distorted drone and expands over cinematic Americana, folkloric balladry and proto-rock, whilst Martin (as The Bug, Techno Animal, Ice, King Midas Sound) gained notoriety producing hulking hyrbids of dancehall, dub and techno that are unparalleled in tactility and dark aggression. As The Bug vs Earth, they released Boa / Cold for Ninjatune in December (listen here), and it is with great pleasure we can announce that they will be performing together for the first time ever, especially for Supersonic Festival. Following this performance, The Bug shall be joined on stage by Flowdan to round up proceedings on Saturday night in style.

Hosted at Birmingham City University, in partnership with the Supersonic Festival and Moog Music Inc.

Supersonic Festival is delighted to be partnering with the internationally renowned Moog Sound Lab and Birmingham City University to create a four week artist residents programme, which will be based at the Parkside campus. The Moog Sound Lab is focused on organic experimentation and is a unique opportunity for artists to explore analog sound-scaping, synthesis and effects.

‘The butterflies-inducing bassline on Donna Summer’s I Feel Love, the unmistakable melody wiggling through New Order’s Blue Monday, the sound of the Millennium Falcon taking off in Star Wars, the sounds of the guns in the new Star Trek movies, most of Kraftwerk’s seminal 1974 album Autobahn and a pretty much endless list of other game changing songs and records from the last four decades all share one thing. The greatest pioneer of electronic music wasn’t a musician, but an eccentric physicist with a longstanding love of taking things apart and putting them back together again. When Robert Moog (it rhymes with “vogue”) unveiled the Moog synthesiser to the world in 1964, he not only radically changed music, but culture itself.’

The lab moves to different venues and was previously Pioneered at Rough Trade NYC. It becomes a temporary residency space, offering a unique opportunity for artists to explore, experiment and create. A physical manifestation of the intersection of music, art and technology, the lab offers a unique resource to artists to make new work.
moogsoundlab.uk

Artists include:

Sarah Angliss, an award winning composer, roboticist and historian of sound.

Gazelle Twin, the twisted Cronenberg-inspired persona of producer, composer and artist, Elizabeth Bernholz.

Free School are a Birmingham retro-futurist, mask-donning disco duo, exploring a unique fusion of Electro, House, Balearic and Kosmiche.

Seán Clancy, Lecturer in Composition at Birmingham Conservatoire will work in collaboration with Thomas Parkes to  develop a new composition built from a vocabulary of analogue sources and samples that will explores tensions between found and original material, between narrative and rupture, particularly as these might be seen to correspond to elite and vernacular values.

Balandino Di Donato will be exploring the Moog lab via touch less control and sound spatialisation as part of his  pioneering research into Integra Live technology.

Mike Dring  will produce a new soundscape based on his interdisciplinary interests from architecture to glitch art. He takes inspiration through field recordings or through interpreting the pattern of movement prescribed by the built environment.

Jason Nicholson reworks the principles of The Harmonograph to produce exquisite physical drawings that seek to illustrate the relationship between musical frequencies, mathematics, art, design and new and existing technologies.

Andy Pilsbury will be developing, Helix, a new interactive online platform that allows users to participate in a multifaceted art project combining high-speed photography, moving image and ethereal soundscapes to create surreal flourishing landscapes.

 Steven Chamberlain (Selloptape Cinema), sound artists Tom Tebby and  Justin Wiggan collaborate on Birmingham: Symphony of a Metropolis, an ambitious new soundtrack. The piece, or ‘city film essay’, is a re-working of the 1927 Walter Ruttman film, Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis

The residency will take place at Birmingham City University’s Parkside campus. A multi-million pound centre of excellence in the heart of Birmingham’s Eastside development.   It will sit alongside the Faculty of Arts, Design and Media Graduate Shows 2015. www.bcu.ac.uk

Supersonic Festival are delighted to confirm that internationally versed sound manipulator Holly Herndon shall practice her neuro-dissecting electronic anomalies on patrons at this year’s event, in support of her recently announced second LP, Platform. Herndon has become a leading light in contemporary music by experimenting within the outer reaches of dance music and pop songwriting possibilities. Herndon makes music that is impossible to ignore and could be viewed as the 21st century’s answer to the protest singer, tackling a host of topics ranging from systemic inequality, surveillance states and neo-feudalism. Her tactile live shows recast the laptop as an untapped physical instrument, to be used in the limbo that links noise, dance, avant and pop.

Audience members are invited to build a three-dimensional sound-object. The sound object will feature printed circuit board artwork and a DIY piezo flared horn that omits bursts of noise and generative electronic bell-like sounds.  It also comes with a rustic stick beater. Dirty Electronics have become synonymous with DIY electronic sound and a music that is born out of hand-made machines. In Dirty Electronics, process and performance are inseparably bound. The ‘performance’ begins on the workbench devising instruments and is extended onto the stage through playing and exploring these instruments.
www.dirtyelectronics.org

Dirty Electronics have collaborated with many artists including Chris Carter (Throbbing Gristle) Merzbow, Pauline Oliveros, Nicholas Bullen (Napalm Death and Scorn) and Rolf Gehlhaar (original Stockhausen group), and have released a series of sold out hand-held synths on Mute Records.

Please note that this workshop will be require sign up and places are limited to just 15 – there is also an additional charge to cover the cost of the materials (£34)
For weekend ticket holders only email ‘dirty electronics’ in the title to russell[at]capsule.org.uk

Supersonic Festival are delighted to be partnering with the British Library Sound Archive to create a new commission as part of the Capsule Labs, an artist development and commissioning scheme devised to create more opportunities for commissioning experimental, cross-disciplinary art.

Stephen Cracknell, founder of The Memory Band, has worked with selected material from the Library’s archive to create a new work, Children of the Stones  is intended as a sonic adventure into the strange heart of our haunted landscape. . Mixing archival recordings, natural and industrial sounds, traditional melodies and original field recordings alongside a new acoustic score, the performance will celebrate the strange, mysterious and playful relationship we have developed with the ancient and magical landscape we inhabit. The title is taken from Jeremy Burnham and Trevor Ray’s classic children’s television series set among the standing stones of Avebury. Since the time of antiquarians John Aubrey and William Stukeley the recording and surveyance of our prehistoric landscape and monuments has had a profound effect upon the modern British mind. In poetry, art and song this landscape has been a canvas onto which we have projected the very essence of how we see ourselves and the ghosts of those who came before us. From William Blake’s visionary Jerusalem to films such as David Rudkin’s Penda’s Fen it has been the backdrop to an exploration of the inherent spirituality of our Island and through the now well-documented folk-horror genre we have used that landscape to explore what lurks in the shadows of our collective identity. We are all children of the stones

Since 2003 The Memory Band has been mapping the mutant edgelands of British Folk music, where digital machinery and acoustic music combine to make traditional music from the future.

thememoryband.com/

To accompany the commission there will be a ltd edition seven inch record on sale containing audio from the performance. These will be hand cut (by Phil Macy) in an edition of 100 with a hand finished sleeve (designed by Ben Javens) on 500 micron charcoal card (in homage to the Folkways Library Sleeves) via Static Caravan Records.

The British Library is home to the nation’s sound archive, an extraordinary collection of over 6.5 million recordings of speech, music, wildlife and the environment, from the 1880s to the present day. It has recently launched the Save our Sounds programme which is a major digitisation project to preserve the nation’s sound heritage – read more here: www.bl.uk/projects/save-our-sounds

A street musician from Prague who specialises in tradional and Medieval instruments, Jiří Wehle has had many musical incarnations in his life, but, in his words, has always followed the path of the troubadour.

Starting his musical life in the 1960’s where he played guitar in a rock and roll band, Wehle has been a prolific artist for over fifty years. After his father’s death in the 90’s, with whom he had a long-standing musical collaboration, he has gone on to play for The Estate Theatre in Prague, compose original music for Czech puppet-performer Pavel Vangeli, and take musical roles in several films.
Wehle also plays constantly in the streets, something which he continued to do throughout the Communist regime of the 1980’s and 1990’s. After this turbulent period in history, Wehle’s music became much more independent, and he also began to use Medieval instruments such as shawms, bagpipes, chalumeaus, krumhorns, cistras and hurdy-gurdy.