Sex Swing have only been in existence since mid-2014 but are already a firm favourite of  The Quietus: ‘Moulded from members of Part Chimp, Mugstar and Dethscalator, Sex Swing could be any number of things. Will they lean more towards the vibe of Dethscalator, a dark channelling of early punk, down to the outrage baiting song titles such as ‘AIDS Atlas’ and ‘World War II Hitler Youth Dagger’? Could they be more infused with Part Chimp’s reverberating, distorted, Bronxesque new-wave punk? Perhaps they’ll side more with the psychedelic, drifting journeys of Mugstar. Maybe though, it’ll be a mix of all of the above, or even something more unique and bizarre.’

What little we do know about them includes their use of organ and saxophone, so take that for what it’s worth. Given the credentials of the members’ previous bands, we’re just as excited to find out as you. They feature Stu Bell on drums and Dan Chandler on vocals, reunited after the collapse of Dethscalator. Except Dan isn’t roaring like a minotaur who’s just stepped on an upturned plug with bare feet, he’s actually singing, and he sounds a little bit like Ian Curtis. Jase Stoll (Mugstar) adds chunky guitar, while Tim Cedar (Part Chimp) plays a mean Alan Vega style organ and Colin Webster is on a giant saxophone, itchily skronking away somewhere between Fela Kuti and Colin Stetson. I mean, I don’t want to jinx it or anything but they might actually be superb…

Fri 12 June 10.30 – 17:00 Millennium Point
Curzon Street, Birmingham, West Midlands B4 7XG

Tickets £6/10 and includes lunch https://bees2015.eventbrite.co.uk
Booking info there are 20 free places available to Supersonic weekend ticket holders
https://bees2015.eventbrite.co.uk
code: superduper

Many & Varied in partnership with Supersonic are delighted to present Bees in a Tin 2015, as part of this year’s festival. Taking place during the daytime on Friday 12th June, Bees in a Tin is a gathering for people who make or are interested in unique interfaces for the world around them, featuring talks and workshops from key makers and thinkers from around the country.  If you’re interested in the spaces where the arts, science, technology, and games crash into one another: then this is for you.

Join us for an energetic day of talks, games, demos and workshops encompassing: microbiology, guided tours, research through design, impersonation of plain clothes police officers, sculptural musical controllers; …and custard. All rounded up with a keynote from the splendid Owl Project.

Key note by Owl Project

A collaborative group of artists consisting of Simon Blackmore, Antony Hall and Steve Symons. They work with wood and electronics to fuse sculpture and sound art, creating music making machines, interfaces and objects which intermix pre-steam and digital technologies. Drawing on influences such as 70’s synthesiser culture, DIY woodworking and current digital crafts, the resulting artwork is a quirky and intriguing critique of the allure and production of technology.

Bill Aitchison – The Tour of All Tours

For the last two and a half years Bill has been taking guided tours of every sort around the world and recycling them by giving his own tours of tours. These are a parasitic sort of guided tour that critically, and with a distinctive dry humour, explore the political, social and cultural subtexts of tourism.

Aste Amundsen/Apocalypse Gameshow – Computer Aided Theatre

In this playtest you are invited to take part in experiments, either as a protagonist progressing through a responsive storyline or as an audience watching and influencing the process. Exploring the ways of: processing audience information/actions during live events, writing meaningfully responsive storyworlds and cuing actors with audience data during interactive exchanges.

George Buckenham – Making videogames with squishy bits

George will be discusiing design principles learnt from making videogames that involve custom physical hardware. Games like: Punch The Custard, a game about punching a bowl of custard, Fabulous Beasts, a game about competing for resources where you make moves by stacking blocks in a tower.

Robert Curgenven – “A Young Lover’s Guide to Perceptual Pataphysics” or “How Bass Changed My Life”

Heavily phasing live sound from custom dubplates, acetates, test pressings and low-frequency oscillators are used to directly power live video projection that works on principles of colour shadows discovered by Edwin Land – the inventor of Polaroid photography and sunglasses. As much a physical exploration of architecture as it is of the audience’s bodies, both through sound and the perceptual psychology of colour and light. Comes with a warning for those susceptible to flickering lights.

Simon Farid – How To Impersonate a Plain Clothes Police Officer

We are going to commit a crime. Impersonating a police officer is against the law, even though we know they impersonate us (the public) all the time. In this workshop we’ll look to rebalance this by impersonating a plain-clothes police officer, something that cannot really be identified. Collectively examining, mimicking and enacting covert police practices will help us to better counter surveillance on ourselves and to look at notional public space in a new way.

Farmer Glitch : Farm-Yard Debris, Carboot Treasures – Petrol Can Synths…

A ‘show and tell’/performance session, showcasing a variety of hand-built/salvaged musical-instruments and sound-making devices. This will include: chip-based synthesisers housed in Kodak Brownie cameras, synths made from old paraffin/oil cans along with a rusty-broken bucket – now re-envisioned as the Atari-Punk-Bucket.

Dr Simon Park – Exploring The Invisible

In the familiar settings of our urban environments, microorganisms have established thriving and complex ecologies that are almost always overlooked. This will be a unique microbiologically informed walk and mobile workshop, which will explore the importance of this the urban microbiology, using examples found in the environment local to the Bees In A Tin event.

Swoomptheeng – Raving with Ritualised Punk Technology

A live Swoomptheeng performance showcasing their over-sized, semi-organic and brightly-coloured sculpted MIDI instruments which illustrate their influences from 80′s TV, 90′s rave and contemporary art; to folk-art, hacking and hobbyist cultures. Followed by a presentation of how the instruments work and the innovative techniques used to interface with music software such as Traktor via MIDI joysticks, Arduino and other electrical components.

Rebecca Taylor – The Rooftop Project: The Story So Far…

The Rooftop Project is an experimental project through which highly rewarding and transformational learning experiences are emerging. Opening with a lively presentation of the story so far, this session will then invite you to discuss ‘our’ awareness of doing projects such as these and pose questions such as – are we doing it for good or glory?

Duncan Speakman – The social composition of A Folded Path

A Folded Path is a pedestrian speaker symphony; a soundtrack for a city carried through the streets by a participating audience.

Comprising location sensitive portable loudspeakers – each playing a different element of the music.The GPS position of the speaker causes different sections to be played and the movement of the people within the group changes the acoustic relationship of the composition: the audience become the orchestra.

Clare Reddington

Clare, Creative Director of Watershed will be chairing a Q&A panel at Bees in a Tin.

A Folded Path – Circumstance
Fri 12 – Sat 13 June

Circumstance are bringing unique performance, A Folded Path to Birmingham as part of the Supersonic festival in partnership with BCMG. The performance invites the audience to become the city’s orchestra, creating soundscapes while walking on a choreographed journey through the streets.

A Folded Path is a pedestrian speaker symphony, a soundtrack for the city, carried through the streets by you, experienced by everyone it passes.
30 custom-built, location-sensitive portable loudspeakers create a stunning and evocative cinematic layer over the city streets, each playing a different element of the music circumstance have composed. One might be playing a voice, another a sweeping violin or glistening electronic tone.

The GPS position of the speaker causes different sections of the composition to be played, so the structure of the work resonates with the environments it passes through. The speakers are highly directional so the movement of the people within the group changes the acoustic relationship between them, the audience become the orchestra.

In small groups, you will take different routes through the city, coming together at points to create moments of harmony and resonance.

Booking info:
To book your free place email russell[at]capsule.org.uk with ‘A Folded Path’ in the title and the time slot you’d like. Each performance is for 30 participants only.

Friday: 7.45pm (SOLD OUT)
Saturday: 2.45pm and 5pm
The performance last about an hour and involves walking so please wear appropriate footwear.
The city centre location will be revealed on sign up

A Folded Path is a co-commission with BCMG
Birmingham Contemporary Music Group thrives on innovation and invention and is critically acclaimed for championing the most forward-looking music regionally, nationally and internationally.

Woven Skull began playing together in 2008 in the empty sparse Irish countryside in a house owned by two of the members and located at the foot of Sheemore (a hill where two factions of fairies clash in an annual battle). These atmospheric surroundings helped to forge their music, which has been described as ‘minimal, repetitive, distorted, ugly and beautiful in one’. The trio spent several years experimenting with combinations of instrumentation, household objects, kitchen utensils, seashells, footsteps, chimes, recordings of cats purring and frogs mating while developing a sound that after a recent set was described as ‘a Turkish Velvet Underground.’

Within the group, song writing is split equally between Aonghus on densely propulsive guitar and Natalia on distorted mandola. The riffs Natalia composes are seeped deep in the Ukrainian lullabies and superstitions that surrounded her as a child and those that Aonghus writes stem from his past musical projects, which span from harsh noise to improv. These are glued together by the endless cyclical rhythms created by Willie and inspired by the sounds of the bogs and woods that surround his home: from syncopated cattle calls to the beating wings of bats in the night to the creaking of trees as they push against each other in the wind.

Woven Skull have recorded in dark haunted woods, beside bottomless lakes, and in the attics of abandoned houses. Their upcoming LP, Lair of the Glowing Bantling, is their first studio album and captures a sound that’s more in line with their live performance than past releases, which have been a mix of lo-fi practice tapes, outdoor recordings and segments from collaborative sets.

Selvhenter, are part of the bustling and sprawling Copenhagen underground. In a controlled eruption of two drum kits and distorted trombone, violin and alto saxophone, they kick against rationalism and the homogeneity of welfare society, showing us that passion doesn’t have to be sung, but can flourish as collective instrumental cramps.

Selvhenter has been active for seven years, performing with influential outfits like the Swedish-Norwegian trio, The Thing, and Japanese drummer, Yasuhiro Yoshigaki’s Orquesta Libre.

The band has honed an uncompromising, boundless sound that blends experimental rock, improvised free jazz and punk, noise and metal. With 2014’s LP, Motions of Large Bodies, Selvhenter has taken their music to a new level, incorporating a strong funky element alongside their characteristic elements of drones, open-minded playfulness and the central polyrhythmic patterns of the two drummers. There are groovy, danceable beats, horns and violin soaring into the sky with drones and long-stretched melodies. Live, the band takes audiences on a trance-like road trip with myriad interesting and at times, surprising, detours.

Ravioli Me Away are a dangerously ambitious and delusional all girl jazzy post punk, hip funk outfit from London.

The drum patterns are rudimental and the keyboard tunes are repeated over and over, they aren’t about how complex the songs are, this is immediate and in your face. A true Riot Grrl sensibility. They use samples of David Cameron to illustrate what is wrong and where they stand. More often than not the lyrics are shouted and screamed out rather than just sung. Voices are used as instruments and sounds are slammed together to make things work.

But then, just as you are getting sucked into the weird, off kilter world of Ravioli Me Away they produce the final two songs on the album which are so at odds with the rest that it’s almost as if they thought they should do something different. ‘Euro Breakdown’ has a classic electro sound, polished and catchy. While ‘Scooby Loop’ gives you dubby bass, weird little sounds underneath and a fantastic groove.

Gazelle Twin is the creation of producer, composer and artist, Elizabeth Bernholz. From the start, Bernholz has utilised the anonymity provided by costumes, masquerade-like, to assist in her performance. ‘The original reason,’ says Benholz, ‘is that I’m quite shy and, with my face on show, I’d be inclined to be meek and apologetic.’ Rather than an exercise in vulgar emotional exhibitionism, Gazelle Twin constitutes ‘a retreat inwards’, crossing boundaries of identity and gender.

The persona created for 2014’s industrial-pop LP, Unflesh, and on display live in recent months, grew partly out of Bernholz’s response to the London riots: ‘young people are always demonised, very misunderstood, but they’re also at the peak of this intense consumerist culture. You just think, what might happen if we ply generation on generation with excess desire, unattainable desires, and just hammer it? It’s survival mode, but it’s survival for nothing. Survival for the most menial reward. You’re not running from a lion, you’re just trying to get out of the supermarket after buying some dinner.’

Gazelle Twin’s unnerving, Cronenberg-inspired craft is, according to Bernholz, ‘like a shedding of skin. It’s a tearing out of your body down to your skeleton and breaking free’. Paradoxically perhaps in the light of this, Gazelle Twin is also a unusually discreet, secretive animal in a world where new female starlets are pushed to reveal everything about their private lives, in song and interview, photograph and film. Instead, Bernholz masks the surface, taking us on a dark and depraved journey into the remote cells of her subconscious.

As Circuit des Yeux, Haley Fohr creates music that embodies the complexity of human emotions, juxtaposing tenderness and grief, ecstasy and horror, using sounds as representations of the emotional spectrum that we all experience.

Fohr’s striking, impassioned baritone is the centrepiece and guiding force of Circuit Des Yeux. Gravitating towards singers like Ma Rainey, Memphis Minnie, Etta James and Billy Holiday, her songs tap into the stark imagery of pre-war blues, folk and jazz, as well as also being influenced in equal parts by her study of ethnomusicology.

During an extensive period of touring in 2013, Fohr traveled solo: no band, no tour manager, no driver. In that solitude she learned to commune with the audience in a way that she hadn’t ever before. That connection sparked in her mind a conversation with the audience, and many of the lyrics on new album In Plain Speech convey an intimacy with the listener. Fohr also became acutely aware of disquiet, a pervasive anxiety, which permeated society in almost every city she visited. ‘I felt an uneasiness that superseded phonetic communication,’ she writes. ‘Something dim is in the air, and it is looming large.’

Circuit des Yeux “Lithonia” (Official Music Video) from Circuit des Yeux on Vimeo.

The solo musical guise of Glaswegian DIY protagonist Michael Kasparis, Apsotille was initially a creative harbour from his groups Please and The Lowest Form. With the imminent release of new album, Powerless, the project has grown into an explosive synth-punk project unafraid of both physicality and emotional leakage. Live Apostille is raw and unleashed, immersing the audience in his adrenaline surges of expression.

Fiercely independent in practice and execution, Apostille’s stated purpose is to bridge the gap between audience and performer, to connect through the fog of power structures and post-modernism and to ferment a direct pop music unconcerned with control.

Rhodri Davies plays harp, electric harp, live-electronics and builds wind, water, ice, dry ice and fire harp installations. He has released four solo albums: Trem, Over Shadows, Wound Response and An Air Swept Clean of All Distance.

His regular groups include: a duo with John Butcher, Cranc, HEN OGLEDD with Richard Dawson and Common Objects. He has performed, recorded or collaborated with the following artists: Derek Bailey, Laura Cannell, Jenny Hval, C Joynes, Kahimi Karie, Okkyung Lee, Phill Niblock, Jim O’Rourke, Bill Orcutt, Ben Patterson, Eliane Radigue, Otomo Yoshihide and John Zorn.

Phil Tyler plays Anglo-American folk music using guitar, banjo, voice and fiddle. From Newcastle upon Tyne, he has played in various folk, rock and ceilidh bands for many years. His music is steeped in a love of traditional narrative song, full-voiced sacred harp singing and sparse mountain banjo. Alongside his wife, Cath, Tyler has performed on stages as diverse as the Royal Opera House in London and a dank tower in the old city walls of Newcastle. Taking a more minimal approach to material than some, Tyler’s music penetrates to the very rawest essence of folk tradition.

Afework Nigussie is a musician and singer from Gondar in northern Ethiopia. He has a background in Azmari, the music of the wandering minstrels. The Azmari are the voices of freedom of expression in Ethiopia, improvising constantly, commenting on politics, religion and everyday life. Their style is very specific, both provocative and humorous. Nigusse has also trained at the National Theatre in Addis Ababa and, more recently, collaborated with The Ex.

Nigussie’s music celebrates the rich tradition of both secular and religious music in Ethiopia, which has resulted in a wide range of zefen (folk song). Zefen include songs to accompany iskista (dancing), fukara to celebrate the heroic deeds of warriors and musho and lekso to express sorrow at funerals. Singing forms the accompaniment of farming and comes to the fore at every pivotal moment of life. He also plays a range of traditional stringed, woodwind and percussive instruments. Many people are familiar with the Ethiopian music of the golden seventies; Nigussie’s music both harks back to this era and innovates the ancient Azmari tradition.

Rising up from the bed of the River Tyne, a voice that crumbles and soars, steeped in age-old balladry and finely-chiselled observations of the mundane, Richard Dawson is a skewed troubadour, at once charming and abrasive.

Dawson is a barrage of musical expression and personality. A shambling exterior, amidst tales of pineapples and underpants, ghosts of family members and cats, his stage presence is at once inviting and awe-inspiring. The visceral power of his voice against the lurching modality of his guitar lines conjures false memories of Tim Buckley and Richard Youngs duetting with Sir Richard Bishop and Zoot Horn Rollo. There is a rawness to the music that embodies timeworn singing traditions: the fire and pestilence gait of the Sacred Harp singings, the fractured call and response of the Gaelic Psalms, the unbridled power of Mongolian throat singers. Its power is tempered by intimacy, flecked with human emotion anchored by a sense of place. These are tales sung to ward off the misery of the everyday, to transport and transcend, one moment tender, one moment violent. Music to alter our reality.

Having spent years incubating his singular art, becoming a quiet legend on the Newcastle experimental scene before exploding across the UK and Europe in 2012, Richard is no stranger to the Supersonic stage. This year, he returns to perform as well as curate an afternoon of music by a selection of his favourite artists from the UK and across the globe, offering a very special insight into his musical fascinations.

Six Organs Of Admittance‘s Ben Chasny is an artist as prolific as he is chameleonic, with his recorded output ranging from sunny, free flowing folk to shimmering dronescapes and scorching elongated jams. Chasny has a restless intellect, which has regularly guided the progress of his creation. A lyrical mastery of acoustic finger-picking would be enough to build a body of work for most musicians; this is just the stepping-off point for Ben. From the earliest days of private-press psych home recordings, Six Organs of Admittance has sought out alter- native spaces in which to make music and has challenged his audience to keep up with his rapid advances into new terrain.You can never be completely sure what Chasny has in store for you when it comes to the band’s live performances.

Ben will also be hosting a workshop to explain his Hexadic System.
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.

Join Six Organs of Admittance’s Ben Chasny for a workshop on his Hexadic system. Instructions on how to create unique tonal progressions, poetry and even games will be addressed. Each audience member will create their unique guitar compositions for the day with a chance to hear how they sound. Charts and diagrams will be provided for audience members to document and leave with their own compositions.

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.

The workshop will be 1 hour and will take place at 14.45 on Saturday afternoon
Places are limited to 15 and are free to weekend ticket holders
SOLD OUT

Post punk provocateurs The Pop Group will be bringing their pioneering throb to Supersonic. Drawing on an eclectic range of influences from free jazz, conscious funk, heavyweight dub to avant-garde experimentalism, alongside contemporaries like Public Image Limited, This Heat and Throbbing Gristle, they were at the forefront of a musical period marked out by its ground-breaking innovation.  Socially conscious, their politically-charged lyrics boasted intellectual influences including Wilhelm Reich, situationism, French romanticism and the beat poets. With a legion of admirers, they have inspired many from Nick Cave to Fugazi. As dissonant as they are danceable, they recently announced the release of their first album in 35 years, Citizen Zombie, as well as single ‘Mad Truth’, proving as relevant now as they ever were.

On Sunday 14 June Richard Dawson curates an afternoon show named after his infamous podcast the DELIGHT IS RIGHT. With a number of rare UK performances by artists handpicked by Dawson, the line-up reflects the diversity of sounds that feed into his own songwriting.

Richard Dawson is a skewed troubadour at once charming and abrasive. His shambolically virtuosic guitar playing ranges from sublime intricacy to spidery swatches of noise-colour, swathed in amp static and veering from stumble to soaring reverie.

These include Ethiopian free spirit Afework Nigussie, who plays a range of traditional stringed, woodwind and percussive instruments. Many people are familiar with the Ethiopian music of the golden seventies; Nigussie’s music both harks back to this era and innovates the ancient Azmari tradition. An artist for over fifty years, Jiří Wehle is a Czech street musician from Prague who specialises in ethnic and Medieval instruments. Also performing is prepared violin innovator Angharad Davies, harp liberationist Rhodri Davies and fellow Tyne folk narrator Phil Tyler.

On Thursday 11 June we launch Supersonic 2015 with a very special opening concert will take place at the famous Birmingham Town Hall, a Victorian Roman revival grade I listed building. In the sixties and seventies, the venue saw performances from the cream of contemporary music, including Soft Machine, Roberta Flack and, of course, Black Sabbath.

The Will Gregory Moog Ensemble is set to be a breathtaking aural and visual spectacle in these hallowed environs. As one half of the electronic music sensation Goldfrapp, producer, composer and multi-instrumentalist Will Gregory is passionate about creating new sounds and reinventing old ones. Here a stellar line-up stretches the possibilities of the Moog synthesiser through newly composed music, transcriptions of classical works, and their own versions of music from popular culture and film. Marvel at ten musicians on stage, including Portishead’s Adrian Utley and composer Graham Fitkin, perform works by Bach, John Carpenter, Burt Bacharach and Oliver Messiean on a fascinating array of vintage instruments, their oscillators so sensitive to temperature and movement that there seems almost something organic about these gorgeous machines.

To mark the tenth anniversary of Robert Moog’s death, a new piece by Gregory features a clocking device specially built for the ensemble that enables all ten synths to be synced, producing music previously impossible to perform live. The result will be the audio equivalent of a Bridget Riley painting; full of colour and interlocking complexity whilst driving and immediate.

Fains are a new improvised project by Nick Jonah Davis on electric guitar and Johanna Cormack on violin creating sonic landscapes and new musical textures.
www.nickjonahdavis.com

Produced by SoundUK and hosted at Town Hall

Ever since Schoenberg and Kandinsky became pen pals back in 1907, avant-garde art and experimental music has been attempting to find some common ground. But, it’s not been easy. Here’s Capsule’s contribution towards a solution: Supersonic Kids Gigs ‘Big Sounds for Little People’. If you couldn’t guess from the snappy title, it’s a gig for kids and their families, which aims to introduce children to experimental music at an early age. Kids Gigs provide a fantastic opportunity to show children the beauty of live music.
Recommended for kids under 7 – the gig will take place at Symphony Hall on Saturday 13 June 11am – free event

The Supersonic Kids Gig will be led by Flamingods.
This Bahrain-born, Brixton-based troupe take African rhythms, repetitive grooves to form a riot of sound and fury that’s both sonically adventurous and feverishly compelling. With po-faced muso tactics at a minimum and dancefloor frenzy to the fore, they bring a welcome and vibrant splash of day-glo.

Supported by Anorak Magazine
Anorak, the ‘happy mag for kids’, has been a pioneering title in the children’s magazine market since 2006 and is now distributed worldwide.

Two musicians on a quest to deconstruct their normal sonic palette and create a new and unfamiliar sound world. Prepared percussion, electronic drums, oscillators and more are deployed to create spacious, ranging sound collages. Having played for years in bands such as The Oscillation, Shit N Shine, Neon Neon, Raime, Voice Of Seven Thunders, Luke Roberts and countless others, TOMAGA channels multi-instrumentalism into music that is by turns reminiscent of industrial, jazz, psychedelia and minimalism. Rather than the complex, abstract sound that we might have expected to result from their totally unfettered musical explorations, the duo’s minimalist compositions are darkly psychedelic, elusive and deeply imbued with images, as though they have set some curiously unsettled, surreal dreams to music. After their first, self-produced cassette, Sleepy Jazz For Tired Cats, which was released in 2013, TOMAGA recently released their first album. ‘Futura Grotesk’ French label, Hands in the Dark (Robedoor, Saåad). Visual projections, angular electronics and mesmeric rhythms effect and immersive live presence reminiscent at moments of Can and Grumbling Fur.

We don’t know anything about Slow Magic: the electronic musician closely guards his identity in order to challenge the way his music is presented and received. Wearing a fluorescent part-fox, part-zebra mask, Slow Magic is an immersive live sensation, whose sets feature programmed and live drums, projections, a light show and a welcome dose of crowd participation.
Slow Magic’s illuminated facade is, surprisingly, something of a leveller. His shows are an ambient, danceable, euphoric shared experience where the relationship between audience and performer is equalized.

Choreographed light show synchronised with his zebra mask. Acrobatic and infectiously enthusiastic live performer who revels in interaction with the crowd, including jumping in to create a drum circle. Crowd participation – portable percussion set. Ritualistic circles Intrigue and mystical Rare level of performativity and playfulness in the live electronic music scene. Make your own equine/fox inspired mask and there’s a chance you may be pulled up on stage to take part in the performance!

For the uninitiated, Liturgy’s yearning, life-affirming music exists in an uncanny space between avant rock, black metal, fine art and shamanic ritual. The band began as the solo project of Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, who remains the sole songwriter and conceptual architect. Since 2009, he has been joined by guitarist Bernard Gann, bassist Tyler Dusenbury and force-of-nature drummer, Greg Fox, who performed earlier this year with Ben Frost as part of our ‘Supersonic Presents’ series.

Their fervid and cohesive live presence, in particular Fox’s unorthodox and dynamic drumming, quickly earned them a following both in the global metal underground and the Brooklyn art punk scene. Controversy erupted, along with interest from the wider world, around the companion piece to 2009’s album, ‘Renihilation’, Hunt-Hendrix’s text, ‘Transcendental Black Metal: A Vision of Apocalyptic Humanism’. In its appropriation and intellectual exploration of black metal, Liturgy challenges notions of musical identity and legitimacy. Beyond this, however, performing stripped of black metal’s traditional hallmarks of costumes and props and beyond the theorising, Liturgy are truly transcendental live. Staggering in their technical precision, they move and swell together within a scorchingly intense cavern of sound. Their third full length, ‘The Ark Work’, is a quantum leap forward, a radical change in sound that paradoxically sounds more like Liturgy than ever. Blindingly intense, brutal and ecstatic, Liturgy is the rock band as a real-time visionary performance/art/life project. Prepare to be blown away.

Liima is the new band of Efterklang members, Mads Brauer, Casper Clausen and Rasmus Stolberg, and Finnish percussionist, Tatu Rönkkö. A live improvisation project, this is the sound of four musicians communicating at an entirely intuitive level with one another, revelling in the joys and terrors of letting go of control over the music being created. Efterklang graced the Supersonic stage back in 2008, and we’re thrilled to welcome back this bold, beautiful and experimental new incarnation. Liima is something of a palate cleanser and a departure for the members of Efterklang, who, after knowing each other for sixteen years, welcomed Rönkkö as their drummer upon the release of their most recent album, Piramida.

During lengthy tours, the magnetic energy of Rönkkö’s spontaneous percussion improvisations in between songs proved to be the kernel for Liima. Conceptually, what the four-piece have created is intentionally the polar opposite of Efterklang’s meticulous, painstakingly crafted music. The band meet in a city of their choosing, experiment for a week and perform the results. On a more visceral level, however, Efterklang and Liima seem to be on a continuum that celebrates the power and depth of musical relationships. Indeed, Liima is the Finnish word for ‘glue’, and this is an apt metaphor for the band’s combination of processed vocals, guitar, looped percussion and complex interweaving synthesised sounds, which create a free and emotionally raw live experience.

Glasgow-based duo Suzanne Rodden and Lewis Cook capture the feeling of being up until day-break. Layers of analogue synths delaying into the horizon, distorted drum machines and disco-at-sunset vocals all conspire to create a seductive, retro-futuristic vision. French / Italo disco, acid bass lines and a sense of Scottish optimism abound, playing out the perfect club night in ecstatic fashion. It’s an enchanting, inclusive vision; everyone is invited, the future is bright. Originally from the Scottish borders and life-partners since high school, Rodden and Cook (also of The Cosmic Dead) began Happy Meals in a flurry of experimentation at Glasgow’s creative hub, The Green Door Studio. Initially the result of a free music production course, debut album, Apéro, sees the pair embark on a blissful voyage into a love-fuelled, outward-looking hedonism. Both artists operate machines and sing but it’s the dominating Franco-Scottish lingua-franca of Rodden that imbues their music with a sense of sophisticated fun. Think slow BPM’s and a palette inspired by 100% Silk, laced with the psychedelic tinges of Peaking Lights. In the words of the band themselves, Happy Meals sounds like ‘the warm eyes of the future washed over with THE END’.