Following the news that the 2010 edition of Birmingham’s acclaimed annual Supersonic Festival will be headlined by NAPALM DEATH, SWANS, GODFLESH, HALLOGALLO and MELT BANANA, Capsule are excited to announce the final few acts who will be appearing at this year’s festival, as well as reveal highlights from the incredible film, talks and visual arts programme.

Latest additions to the Supersonic line-up include the awesome live orchestra, Chrome Hoof, experimental hardcore band Ruins, the heavy riffage of Dethscalator and the melancholic pop sounds of Daniel O’Sullivan’s new project, Mothlite. Also, a special AV set from the hugely evocative Barn Owl, the psych/folk/electronic sounds of Health & Efficiency, regular jazz meets free improv in the form of Steve Tromans & Dan Nicholls Duo and Black Sun Drum Corps presenting a percussion parade through the festival, which will combine Supersonic Festival performers and audience members to create a visceral and live massed drumming experience. From metal to avant garde and folk, Supersonic 2010 is set to cement the festival’s reputation as one of the most original and eclectic music festivals in the UK.

Tickets on sale now
Friday: £20, Sat/Sun: £35, Weekend: £75

FRIDAY 22ND OCTOBER
NAPALM DEATH
DEAD FADER / DEMONS (W/SICK LLAMA) / DEVILMAN (W/DJ SCOTCH EGG) / DRUMCORPS / FUKPIG / GUM TAKES TOOTH / NECRO DEATHMORT / PCM

SATURDAY 23RD OCTOBER
GODFLESH + MELT BANANA
BLUE SABBATH BLACK FIJI / CAVE / CLOAKS (exclusive solo DJ set) / DOSH / EAGLE TWIN / GNAW / GNOD / KING MIDAS SOUND / LASH FRENZY vs KK NULL / LICHENS / OvO / PART WILD HORSES MANE ON BOTH SIDES / PEOPLE LIKE US / STEVE TROMAN & DAN NICHOLLS DUO / STINKY WIZZLETEAT /  TWEAK BIRD

SUNDAY 24TH OCTOBER
SWANS + HALLOGALLO
BARN OWL / BLACK SUN DRUM CORPS / CHROME HOOF / DETHSCALATOR / BONG / FACTORY FLOOR / HEALTH & EFFICIENCY / JAILBREAK FEAT. CHRIS CORSANO + HEATHER LEIGH / JAMES BLACKSHAW / KHYAM ALLAMI AND MASTER MUSICIANS OF BUKKAKE / MOTH LITE /  MUGSTAR /  NISENNENMONDAI / PETER BRODERICK / PIERRE BASTIEN + MALE INSTRUMENTY / RUINS / VOICE OF THE SEVEN THUNDERS / ZENI GEVA

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http://www.myspace.com/dethscalator

Swansea Love Story
Produced and Directed by Andy Capper and Leo Leigh
Soundtrack includes Spiritualized, Sian Alice Group  and Dunvnat Male Voice Choir

VBS befriends a gang of young addicts caught up in South Wales’ largely ignored heroin epidemic. Our intimate look into their lives shows how economic depression, family breakdown, and addiction create unbreakable cycles for the people in their grip.
“The must-see British film of the year” The Guardian

The Vice Guide To Liberia
Produced & Directed by Andy Capper and Shane Smith
Soundtrack by Cut Hands aka William Bennett of Whitehouse

In The Vice Guide To Liberia, VBS correspondents travel to the capital city Monrovia to meet three men who participated in the 14 years of civil war that ravaged the West African country.
These men are former warlords General Rambo, General Bin Laden and General Butt Naked, who freely admits to cannibalism and a body count of 20,000 during his time in the war. They  give us guided tours of some of the most dangerous, impoverished areas including jails, brothels, and heroin dens. Despite the UN’s intervention in the country, the majority of Liberia’s young people live in desperate poverty. Surrounded by filth, drug addiction, and teenage prostitution, the ex child soldiers who were forced into war struggle to fend for themselves by any means necessary. As the former President Charles Taylor fights accusations of mass war crimes in The Hague, the people strive for positive change against all odds. America’s one and only foray into African colonialism is keeping a very uneasy peace indeed.

Their music traverses an encyclopaedia of influences; psych, folk, no wave noise and electronic perhaps being some of the more predominant. They utilise banjo, two basses, two guitars, synths, samplers and more effects and loop pedals than it’s reasonable for one band to need.
http://healthandefficiency.net

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http://www.myspace.com/ruinsband

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http://www.myspace.com/mothlite

Dark Age Soon from Mothlite on Vimeo.

http://www.myspace.com/chromehoof

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We’re sorry to say that the Supersonic Noise Box workshop is now fully booked.

A marvellous bit of film footage from the mighty Accused from Supersonic 09
Brad will be back with us this year as a member of Master Musicians Of Bukkake

We’re delighted to announce a very special live interview with Hallogallo over the weekend of Supersonic Festival hosted by The Quietus. It will take place on Sunday in the Theatre Space.

The Quietus is a music and culture online magazine (recently voted Website of the Year by Record of the Day) now well into its third year of existence.

When editors Luke Turner and John Doran are asked to describe their remit, for want of anything sensible to say they often reply, “We cover all music that was recorded after 1974, the year that Kraftwerk’s Autobahn created modern popular music.” So it was with great pleasure that we were asked to be part of the festival this year, not just because of the typically excellent line-up chosen by Lisa and Jenny, but because it gave us a chance to work with former Kraftwerk and Neu! guitarist Michael Rother. On top of this we’re overjoyed by the return of Swans, Godflesh and Napalm Death, are looking forward to broadcasting our daily radio programme (tune in) and are looking forward to having a dance to Factory Floor, Gnod, Barn Owl and Gum Takes Tooth. Most of all, John is looking forward to a weekend where the only sustenance and fuel he needs will be extreme music, thus avoiding the curious incident involving a Coventry Station platform and a truncated journey down a tunnel that was full of red flames, not heavenly light that occurred in the bloody aftermath of Supersonic 2008.”

Read more HERE

Motorik Skills:Apache Beat 101 presented by Hallogallo and The Quietus

The word ‘motorik’, which literally means ‘motor skill’ in German, was originally coined by journalists to describe the minimal yet propulsive four four beat that underpinned a surprisingly small amount of leftfield German rock music from the early 70s. It was a hallmark of Klaus Dinger’s drumming for Neu!, although he rejected the term, preferring to call the rhythm the ‘Apache beat’. This metronomic approach could be heard bubbling through in Kraftwerk’s ‘Ruckzuck’, and early Can fare such as the blistering ‘Mother Sky’ and ‘Father Cannot Yell’ but was cemented as we know it now by Neu!

This beat has retrospectively come to be seen as the war drum of modernity; the pulse pushing music and the listener into the future. It is often associated – with good reason – with the great transport networks of Germany, the railway lines and the autobahns. In fact the rhythm even mimics that of a car speeding along the open road or a train clattering along the rails: fast, measured, travel never ending across Europe endless. It was the rock beat stripped back to a glittering chassis. It was the minimalist framework on which subtle improvisation could take place.

Of course, when I had the temerity to say all this to former member of Kraftwerk and Neu! guitarist, Michael Rother, he laughed and said that in fact the inspiration for this measured German rock beat had come from something altogether less mechanistic and more fluid: a game of five-a-side football including himself, Klaus Dinger and Ralf Hutter.

As a bonus to fans we’ve invited Michael Rother on stage to take part in a Q and A discussing the motorik beat, hallogallo, Harmonia and Neu!.

Hosted by  The Quietus

PLEASE NOTE THAT THE THEATRE SPACE HAS LIMITED CAPACITY

www.myspace.com/peterbroderick

Eponymous Andy Field

Somewhere there is a gig happening. A sweat-drenched heartbreaking gig. A set for the ages. There is dancing, and nodding heads, and the sound is loud and and the sound is dirty and the sound is mean and the sound is euphoric. But you are not at that gig. You are here. So, what can we do about that?

Eponymous is about being an audience, whether the band are there or not. It might involve your imagination. It might involve standing up.
Andy Field is a performance maker, creating strange events in unusual places including audio walks, sound installations, festivals of imaginary events, pervasive games, miniature reenactments and one-on-one hazing rituals.

Action Hero
Smoke & Lights: a solo sound encounter for music lovers

Visit Action Hero’s black hole, a solo experience for festival-goers who want to re-live Supersonic’s greatest adventures in sound.

Action Hero have compiled a library of the best aural moments of Supersonic past along with tracks supplied from this year’s line up.

Select your track and step into the sound booth. Begin an auditory assault or an acoustic ramble through Supersonic yesteryear and future sounds. Remember a performance past, imagine you were there, listen in anticipation of the gig you’ll see later, play the front man.

Action Hero are artists based in Bristol making performance and live-art. www.actionhero.org.uk

Presented in collaboration with Fierce Festival
Since 1998 Fierce’s adventurous programme of interventions and performances has established it as a landmark event in the UK’s cultural calendar.

This duo between two keyboard players, Steve Tromans and Dan Nicholls, provides an intriguing collaboration in the great tradition of Supersonic duos.  It has two players playing Fender Rhodes pianos, interacting with each other and improvising around compositions scored by Dan.

“Fearlessly exploring the margins of regular jazz and free-improv.”
John Fordham, The Guardian

www.steve-tromans.co.uk
http://www.myspace.com/risquearts

In association with Birmingham Jazz

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Michael Gira says that being in Swans used to be like “trudging up a sand hill wearing a hair shirt, being sprayed with battery acid, with a midget taunting you”. In which case, why has he resurrected the project, asks Frances Morgan

“Well, first of all, the correct term is disinter,” says a deep-pitched, sardonic and instantly recognisable voice in response to my first question about the reappearance of Swans, over a decade after their last album and tour. “Re-form… I mean, re-animate… er, re-start?” I flounder, stumbling over semantics, before I realise that the band’s originator, Michael Gira, is having something of a laugh with me.

This is something I never expected. From their formation in New York in the early 1980s with albums like Cop and Filth to dissolution in 1997 after live album Swans Are Dead, Swans’ music certainly changed and grew, the band’s sound spreading and blooming from dense No Wave assaults to sprawling, haunted songs, like ivy climbing and eventually claiming a derelict factory building. But it never let up: viewed in retrospect, Gira and his band were remarkable in being not only prolific and experimental – delving into different sounds, characters, atmospheres – but also remaining steadfastly intense, rarely sounding tired or predictable. Something big is always at stake in a Swans record, whether Gira or former co-vocalist Jarboe are roaring in anguish, hammering out a deadpan chain-gang chant, or steering a wistful melody with lyrics touching on pain, performance, sex, blood, God, power and control, damnation and redemption. But beyond the lyrics – and the stories of dysfunction and self-destructiveness within the band – it was the sound of Swans that hinted most at what that something might be. Gira has always been a brilliant arranger, adept at juxtaposing dissonance and almost sentimental melodicism; visceral intimacy and alienated machine-noise. As far back as 1987’s Children Of God, every song has its own well-defined world, every corner obsessively shaded in, whether a waterlogged country lament like ‘Our Love Lies’, Jarboe’s silvery psychedelic ballad ‘In My Garden’, or snarling, vast tour de forces ‘Sex, God, Sex’ and ‘Beautiful Child’. Later, field recordings would be added to the picture, but not necessarily in the ambient way the term suggests: taped conversations, overheard dialogues from parents, lovers, strangers, appeared in the mix, the effect both poignant and unnerving.

Read full interview – The Quietus

We’ve asked a few regular visitors to Supersonic to highlight what they’re most looking forward to at this years festival, to help guide you through our program. First up is Spencer Hickman of Rough Trade East fame, this is what he’s giving the thumbs up to:

Factory Floor
FF will be an absolute highlight of ss10 I can guarantee it. There is no other band in the UK that is exciting me as much as they are , here at Rough Trade we have watched them evolve from a very good post punk band into one of the most incredible electronic bands around. it’s dark, oppressive yet danceable and accessible , i guess a  lazy comparison would be ‘Throbbing Gristle,Cabaret Voltaire shot through with a slice of Weatherall produced Fuck Buttons’. yes they are that good. get excited now.

Swans
Who doesn’t want to see the Swans doing what they do best ? Being moody and unsettling in equal amounts. Although this isn’t an industrial return to their terror inducing early material it is far and away the most aggressive I have heard them sound in a very long time , it also has the songs to back it up this should be very special indeed.

Cloaks
I remember taking the Cloaks record to SS09 to sell on our stall, it was one of those records we had sold a lot of in store but outside of that I had heard little about them, we sold all ten copies by the time the second track had finished, there is no better recommendation than that in my mind. They sound like Skinny Puppy making dubstep , it’s dark, brutal and unforgiving. Oh it’s also very f*cking good, and very f*cking loud.

Peter Broderick
It doesn’t matter if he is being all weird and experimental or creating finely crafted songs ala the ‘home’ record, he is always engaging and blessed with a truly beautiful voice. I have no idea what he will be doing at this years festival but I do know I’ll be watching.

Godflesh
What can you say ? Brummie legends, back when they were releasing records they were way ahead of their time having given us a few years to catch up with them they are back to reclaim  their crown and destroy SS and our ears in the process. very exciting.

Rough Tade will have a stall in our market place this year so make sure you save all your pennies cause they’re bring a whole heap of treats!

The Corps was founded by Drum Major Major Russell McEwan as an extension of Glaswegian subterranean metallers Black Sun. A mix of Scottish Highland pipe band imagery with industrial and tribal rhythms; Russell McEwan will be leading a percussion parade through the festival site. A mix of Supersonic Festival performers and audience members will be contributing percussion, creating a visceral and live massed drumming experience.

http://www.myspace.com/legionofblacksun

Panel discussion: ‘Fear Of Music’: Why Do People Get Rothko But Don’t Get Stockhausen?

David Stubbs’s Fear Of Music pivoted on a fundamental question: why do people get Rothko and not Stockhausen? While the general public has no trouble embracing avant garde visual art there is mass resistance to experimental music, although both were born at the same time and under similar circumstances – and despite the fact that from Schoenberg and Kandinsky onwards, musicians and artists have made repeated efforts to establish a ‘synaesthesia’ between their two media.

For this event, a panel made up of David Stubbs, Brian Duffy (Modified Toy Orchestra) and Christian Jendreiko (God’s White Noise) will discuss the parallel histories of modern art and modern music and wonder why one is embraced and understood while the other is ignored, derided or regarded with complete bewilderment.

About the panel:
David Stubbs is a freelance British music journalist and author. He has been a staff writer at Melody Maker, the NME, and The Wire, and he’s work regularly appears in The Guardian, Arena, The Wire, Uncut and When Saturday Comes.

Brian Duffy is the originator of the Modified Toy Orchestra, who make experimental electronic music using a series of children’s toys rescued from car boot sales. Each toy is modified to utilise new connections, and liberate the surplus value within their circuits.

Christian Jendreiko is an artist who seeks to reconsider acoustics as aspects of how body and mind are constructed, through a decentralized and sculptural approach towards performance; he transforms groups into social sculpture.

Tony Herrington first contributed to The Wire magazine back in 1987, and has been a member of staff at since 1992, before going on to be Editor-in-Chief and Publisher.

Supported by Ikon hosted by Wire Magazine

http://www.myspace.com/gumtakestooth

Grand Union presents Hiker Meat by artist Jamie Shovlin