Portland, Oregon’s Eternal Tapestry have released a gorgeous new psychedelic nature video for their song, Mountain Primrose:

The song is taken from Eternal Tapestry’s new album, Wild Strawberries, which was recorded in a log cabin in the wilds of Oregon and which is out on Thrill Jockey now.

The band will be returning to perform at Supersonic Festival this year after a memorable show back in 2011. Check out our Kickstarter campaign for tickets; line-up can be found here.

Genres are crappy – here’s just good music

There’s nothing like a compilation to give you an insight into the inspirations behind artists’ work, and Glaswegian cosmic disco duo Happy Meals recently put together a corker for GoldFlakePaint blog – follow the link to listen.

Happy Meals’ performance at Supersonic Festival this year is sure to be a treat. Their debut album, Apéro (the singular of ‘apéritif’), has been compulsive listening in the Capsule office for the last few months. Like watching a long-drawn-out sunset on a city rooftop, the album is brimming with an intoxicating sense of anticipation for the night.

And talking of intoxicating anticipation…Tickets for Supersonic are on sale now. A range of festival ticket options (plus great rewards) are available via our Kickstarter campaign. Read more about the line up so far here.

 

He lays the cards next to each other, building a virtual guitar neck across the table. He names each note as he goes: “This is a G,” he says, pointing to the three of hearts. The four of hearts is a G-sharp. He continues until he’s mapped 36 cards across the first three octaves of the guitar neck. 

Six Organs of Admittance are performing at Supersonic Festival this year. Band leader Ben Chasny will also be hosting a workshop to explain his Hexadic System. Over the last two years, this restless intellect has assembled a comprehensive system of musical composition. The system is a catalyst to extinguish patterns and generate new means of chord progressions and choices.

WIRED Magazine published an article earlier this week in which Chasny explains the system, which was inspired by Ramon Llull, a 14th-century monk and progenitor of computer science. The Hexadic System gives its name to Six Organs’ latest album, out on Drag City now. Every song on the album was composed by the band using this system, an exhilarating departure in sound as well as concept.

If you’d like to learn how to make music using the Hexadic System from Ben Chasny himself, keep checking back here for an announcement about the opportunity to take part in a workshop with Ben during Supersonic Festival. Tickets available here via Kickstarter.

Listen to Hexadic by Six Organs of Admittance:

Open call for British Library Sounds Commission

To be premiered at the Supersonic Festival

Deadline for applications: 5pm Friday 27 March 2015

Commission dates: April – June 2015

Performance/installation:

Supersonic Festival, Birmingham, June 11 – 14 2015

Supersonic Festival are delighted to be partnering with the British Library to offer an opportunity for an artist to develop a new work as part of the festival programme in June 2015. The successful artist will have the opportunity to work with selected material and their associated documentation in the Library’s archive to create a new work culminating in a performance or an installation at the festival, as well as being archived within the British Library’s sound collection.

This commission will be presented at the Supersonic Festival, 11 – 14 June, the UK’s premier experimental music and arts festival. Its international reputation and multidisciplinary programme draws audience, artists and industry professionals from across the globe ensuring a great showcase for this new work. For more information on the festival visit www.supersonicfestival.com

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 www.bl.uk/projects/save-our-sounds.

For this commission, selection of wildlife and environmental recordings from the collection will be made available and will include, among other things, the songs & calls of British birds, the soundscapes of natural habitats such as woodland, marshland and the British coastline, and a range of environmental recordings covering weather, waves, streams, rivers and more. Additonal content from other curatorial areas may also be available, subject to availability and rights clearance
More information on the collections can be found at http://sounds.bl.uk

The selected applicant will receive a £750 fee for the development and performance of the commission. They will receive mentoring from the Supersonic team and an introduction to the collections from the British Library’s Curator, Wildlife and Environmental Sounds.

How to Apply:

To apply please send a proposal that includes all of the following:

Your name, contact details and website address.

A short statement explaining why you want to undertake the commission and what you hope to gain by working in this context (300 words max). Also tell us about two pieces of recent work that you are most proud of (200 words max) please save these documents together as a PDF or .doc file.

Evidence of your current work in the following form:

2 x links to your work uploaded to Soundcloud or You Tube/Vimeo.

Please send to [email protected] with ‘BL_SS commission’ in the title
Email attachments must not be larger than 5MB. Application is by email only.

Deadline for applications: 27 March 2015

The Pop Group released their first album in 35 years this week. Entitled Citizen Zombie, the new album has so far received warm reviews in The Line of Best Fit, The Guardian, The Scotsman and The Independent.

According to reviewers, the album is ‘a collage of the unexpected’, ‘breaking sonically satisfying new ground’.

In case you missed it last week, you can still stream the album:

In advance of The Pop Group’s performance at Supersonic Festival this year, we also thought we’d draw your attention to an interview between Mark Stewart and Thurston Moore, published on The Quietus last month. Mutual admirers of each other’s work, the interview gives a fascinating insight into the intertwined relationship between punk in the UK and the USA. Read the interview here.

We also came across this great footage of The Pop Group super fan , Nick Cave, describing the life-changing impact that the band’s single, We are all Prostitutes, had on him.

Lest ye forget, Supersonic Festival 2015 initial line up and tickets are available now! See the line up announcement for further details and for the links to buy tickets via our Kickstarter campaign. Keep checking back here for further announcements in the coming weeks and months.

Sleaford Mods played a sold out show at Hare and Hounds last Friday 20 February. After an incredible year since their last performance in Birmingham at Capsule’s Bring to Light Festival in 2013, for their Supersonic Presents show Sleafords played to a crowd chanting along to every razor sharp line.

A DJ from Defunkt Dialekt set the atmosphere for an adrenaline-filled set from Youth Man and the sludgy wallowing of Rainbow Grave. DJ X’s jungle set kept the post-Sleafords party going.

A big thank you to all those who attended and who helped make such a memorable night, not least to photographer Steve Kilmister for taking these great shots.

Defunkt Dialekt, credit Steve Kilmister

Youth Man, credit Steve Kilmister

 Youth Man, credit Steve Kilmister

Rainbow Grave, credit Steve Kilmister

Rainbow Grave, credit Steve Kilmister

Sleaford Mods, credit Steve Kilmister

 Sleaford Mods, credit Steve Kilmister

 Sleaford Mods, credit Steve Kilmister

Sleaford Mods, credit Steve Kilmister

 Don’t forget that the initial line up and tickets have been released for Supersonic Festival 2015. Check out the line up on our website and follow the link to our Kickstarter campaign for tickets and special limited edition rewards.

Our Kickstarter campaign for Supersonic Festival 2015 reached its goal of raising £20,000 on Sunday, just over a week since it went live. We’re thrilled and would like to say a huge thank you to everybody for pledging and sharing. Your support will help us to bring you the best festival that we possibly can.

Its not quite time for us to don our party hats yet, though. Supersonic Festival is an incredibly expensive event to put on, so all your support would be greatly appreciated. There are still 19 days to go until our Kickstarter campaign ends, so still time to pledge on some fantastic limited edition prizes and to nab your tickets. Please do share with your friends too.

Big thanks again from Team Supersonic.

Post-punk trailblazers The Pop Group release their first album in 35 years next Monday, February 23.

The Pop Group are performing at Supersonic Festival Ltd Edn this year, which runs Thursday 11 – Sunday 14 June. Ahead of this, the album, entitled Citizen Zombie, is being streamed now at factmag.com

Tickets are available for Supersonic Festival now via our Kickstarter campaign. We’re nearly at 95% of our target so do have a look and pledge your support. As well as combination festival tickets at earlybird prices, there are some great extra special prizes up for grabs too.

SUPERSONIC NEEDS YOU!

Capsule’s internationally-renowned festival runs Thursday 11 – Sunday 14 June and there are plenty of opportunities to get involved as a volunteer.

We need a dedicated team of volunteers to help deliver Supersonic over the festival weekend (11/12/13/14 June) and also in the run up to the festival. We expect a minimum of 15 hours over the festival period in exchange for a weekend wristband.

The festival is small enough for everyone involved as a volunteer to gain an overview of how the festival works, and to give real input and value.

If you are interested in being a volunteer at this year’s festival please contact us at [email protected] with “VOLUNTEER 2015″  in the title of your email to get hold of an application form. Forms need to be returned to us by Monday 11 May. As we are running a “Ltd Edt” version of the event this year our team will much smaller than usual and so we may not be able to offer opportunities for everyone to take part.

NB/ unfortunately we can only consider applicants who are 18 years old and over.

On Friday 13th February we launched our very first Kickstarter campaign, with the aim of raising £20,000 to help us put on the best Supersonic Festival that we possibly can.

We’re delighted to report that many of you showed your support to us, pledging towards Earlybird tickets and some extra special limited edition prizes to boot. At the moment, just over 200 backers have helped us to raise almost 90% of our funding goal in only four days.

We want to say a big thank you to everybody who has helped us to achieve this very healthy start. Please do continue to pledge and to spread the word about Supersonic Festival 2015. Our fantastic audience makes us what we are, and we need to meet the goal to secure the pledges. Check out our Kickstarter page here to read more about the prize options.

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

SUPERSONIC FESTIVAL RETURNS THIS JUNE
FOR THE TWELFTH EDITION OF ADVENTUROUS MUSIC AND ARTS

INITIAL LINE UP ANNOUNCED AS EARLY BIRD TICKETS GO ON SALE VIA A KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN

“Birmingham’s Supersonic Festival occupies an exalted position at the vanguard of the festival circuit. And rightly so. Since its inception over ten years ago, it has maintained a staggeringly focused and intelligent curatorial policy, transcending the music and art worlds to present a programme teeming with invention, audience participation and a certain amount of unpredictability. It’s also a bloody good knees up.”
– THE SKINNY

Capsule bring you Supersonic Festival, an internationally-renowned experimental music and arts festival with genre-bending sound and performance at its heart. Over the years, Supersonic Festival is privileged to have garnered an incredibly loyal audience and is widely regarded as one of the best experimental arts festivals in the UK, last year selling out in record time.

Whether you’ve been to every Supersonic that ever was or this year you’ll be dipping your toes into our welcoming waters for the first time, we are sure you’ll love our unmissable line-up.

Kicking off proceedings on Thursday 11th June will be an opening concert at the legendary Birmingham Town Hall, an impressive Grade 1 listed building which has seen past performances by the likes of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. Supersonic are delighted to host the Will Gregory Moog Ensemble.  As one half of the electronic music sensation Goldfrapp, 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 10 musicians on stage, including Portishead’s Adrian Utley and composer Graham Fitkin, performing works by Bach, John Carpenter, Burt Bacharach and Oliver Messiaen on a fascinating array of vintage instruments.  Moreover, a new piece by Will Gregory features a clocking device specially built for the ensemble that enables all 10 synths to be synced, producing music previously impossible to perform live.

Following on, 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. With a legion of admirers, they have inspired many from Nick Cave to Fugazi. As dissonant as they are danceable,  they recently released their first single in thirty-five years, ‘Mad Truth’, proving as relevant now as they ever were.

 Six Organs Of Admittance (Ben Chasny) will be performing, dissecting and demonstrating The Hexadic System – the name of his soon-to-be released album for Drag City, and a malleable, open-ended process that Chasny developed for song-crafting, taking in aspects of language, graphics and chance. Decipher the workings for yourself at a limited workshop Chasny will be hosting.

Also announced to play across the weekend are Liima, a new collaborative quartet formed of Danish indie-pop trio Efterklang and Finland’s finest improvisational percussionist Tatu Rönkkö. 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.

The esteemed Thrill Jockey record label has two artists present for the festival – Portland’s psych rock explorers Eternal Tapestry will be making the journey across the Atlantic to fry some synapses in support of their new album Wild Strawberries, whilst post-everything black metal lone wolves Liturgy will showcase their detailed dissections of cross-fertilising hardstyle beats and occult-orientated rap present on their soon-to-be-released LP, The Ark Work.

Glasgow’s Happy Meals, life-partners since high school finding expression in cosmic pop form, will be bringing their sophisticated Franco-Scottish hedonism to the festival.

While super-kinetic London future jazz outfit Tomaga, the anonymous sundrenched sounds of Slow Magic, and Swedish maxi-experimentalist duo Wildbirds & Peacedrums shall all also be in attendance.

Flamingods, Bahrain-born, Brixton-based troupe take African rhythms, repetitive grooves and a pleasure-seeking sensibility to form a riot of sound and fury that’s both sonically adventurous and feverishly compelling. Bringing a welcome and vibrant splash of day-glo to the main festival programme, they will also lead the Supersonic Kids Gig – Big Sounds For Little People, a special show for the under 7’s.

On Sunday 14th June, Richard Dawson curates an afternoon of performance, named after his infamous podcast Delight Is Right. The programme will play host to a number of very rare live UK performances by artists handpicked by Dawson, those whom he holds dear and sites as an influence on his own songwriting.   The skewed troubadour shall also be performing on this day. His shambolically virtuosic guitar playing is at once charming and abrasive,  stumbling from music-hall tune-smithery to spidery swatches of noise-colour, swathed in amp static and teetering on the edge of feedback. His songs are both chucklesome and tragic, rooted in a febrile imagination.

Ever looking forward, Supersonic is re-imagining its format this year.  The 2015 edition will be relocating to ‘The Crossing’ in Digbeth which is a brand new venue and one of Birmingham’s hidden venue gems with state of the art sound, lighting and a/v gear specifically designed for live amplified music. The second stage is located a minutes walk away in Boxxed, a post industrial warehouse space where the festival has taken place in previous years. These spaces will play host to live performances, a market place, talks, workshops and the famous Supersonic Tea Room full of epicurean delights.

You can expect PLENTY more from the festival in the way of dance and debate, participation and observation, as well as more acts to be announced in the coming months, so do keep tuned lest you miss out on what marvels are in store.

Early-bird packages are available via our Kickstarter campaign  which has been launched to offer unqiue treats to those who wish to purchase these advance tickets.

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’.

Delirious, intense and uplifting, prepare to be carried away to a distant shore of your imagination with Flamingods. The captain of the five piece multi-instrumental band is Kamal Rasool, who, along with fellow band members, was inspired to write 2014’s excellent LP, ‘Hyperborea’ after new Visa laws forced him out of the UK. ‘Hyperborea’ is the namesake of a mystical island of Flamingods’ own creation, affirming the imaginative boundlessness of their musical and aesthetic universe. Explorative both thematically and aurally, the music addresses themes of identity, belonging and alienation whilst also day dreaming of leaving to foreign far away lands. Now based in the UK, the band is often described as ‘ethnic pop’, which refers to a heady and utterly unique mix of noise, psychedelia, tribal and freak folk.
Seeking to create both vivid and vague scenes inspired by foreign cultures from different ages and to take influence from wherever they can find it, we think Flamingods will be a truly inspiring addition not only to Supersonic’s core programme, but also to our special Kids’ Gigs series, which aims to introduce children to the joys of experimental music. And we haven’t even mentioned their matching psychedelic robes yet!

Flamingods bandcamp link

Come and spend some time in the aural forest of Portland, Oregon’s Eternal Tapestry. This band of  ‘psych-hikers’, as one critic memorably describes them, have always drawn inspiration for their music from the dense native forests that surround their hometown. Delicate keyboard and synth lines cast dappled sunlight on their verdant, psych-rock sound-scape; looming organ drones and pentatonic guitar riffs have a lusciousness that is met with interweaving drums and bass of just the right heaviness. The whole sound ebbs and flows organically in alternately meditative and exuberant space rock surges, flecked with earthy, stream of consciousness-inflected vocals.

Aptly, newest release for Thrill Jockey, ‘Wild Strawberries’, was recorded in a cabin next to the delightfully named Zigzag River. Prior to the recording session drummer Jed Bindeman came across 700 Phish cassette bootlegs, and it was on these cassettes that the sessions for Wild Strawberries were taped, using an eight-track recorder, a palimpsestic approach that reveals much about their vision. Whilst Eternal Tapestry encompasses the joy of meandering and improvisation, this band is not formless or overgrown: there’s shape and purpose to their explorations. Perfectly judged embellishments of improvisatory saxophone add to the contextualisation of the band within an even richer seam of American aesthetic and music traditions, rooted in the West Coast and beyond, including funk, Americana and traditional folk as well as the more lysergic glades of rock. A golden heritage indeed. This is a band dreaming of a magical path to the Sun, and we’re following on their tails.