Tim Hecker is a master of sound, crafting beautiful waves of feedback and allowing them to gently wash over you whilst anchoring them to a rich, melodic core. Hecker has established himself as one of the world’s premier ambient musicians, but just in case his charms have somehow passed you by, here’s a brief taster of some of his impressive discography to prepare you for his set at Supersonic this year…

2001 – Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again

Hecker’s debut album was a startling mixture of glitchy electronica and post rock melodies, ammounting to a stunning ambient soundscape that signalled the sound of jaws hitting the floor worldwide. Hecker summoned all of this using only guitar, piano and a laptop, an early indication of how much sonic depth Hecker is capable of wringing out of basic instrumentation.

2002 – My Love Is Rotten To The Core

Hecker’s third release revolves around a somewhat bizarre concept; the dissolution and break up of the band Van Halen. Taking snippets of interview footage and using Van Halen songs as sound sources, Hecker constructs a narrative chronicling the rise and fall of the band, set to a melancholy precession of electric drones and soothing, crackling ambience.

2006 – Harmony In Ultraviolet

‘Harmony In Ultraviolet’ is perhaps Hecker’s masterpiece, a monolith of sensual ambient waves that caress and envelop the very core of your being. The album’s lucid flow and incredibly affecting tones create the perfect sonic caccoon in which to wrap yourself in and forget the world. Few ambient records are as immersive and emotive as ‘Harmony In Ultraviolent’, the record in which Hecker truly came into his own. Essential listening!

2008 – Fantasma Parastasie

This album found Hecker in collaboration with Nadja’s Aidan Baker, a combination that makes perfect sense given both individual’s penchant for deep, warm soundscapes. Songs like ‘Hymn To the Idea Of Night’ and ‘Auditory Spirits’ perfectly illustrate how nuanced Hecker and Baker’s sonic craftsmanship has become, whilst the extraordinary ‘Skeleton Dance’ pits Baker’s droning guitar wails against Hecker’s keen ear and intricate feel for sound manipulation. The results are astonishing, and will surely captivate anyone with an interest in ambient music.

2011 – Dropped Pianos

Following his stunning new record ‘Ravedeath, 1972’, Hecker released this EP consisting of his untreated source material for the album, a revealing glimpse into his working process. A very different beast to ‘Ravedeath’s expansive, widescreen scope, ‘Dropped Pianos’ is a sparse yet incredibly intimate collection, showcasing the kind of stark, elegant beauty that some artists spend their entire lives trying to attain; if ever more evidence were needed that Hecker is a master of his craft, just allow these delicate sketches to caress your ears and you’ll see what we mean!

Tim Hecker will be performing at Supersonic Festival on Sunday 21st October.

Bringing the sunny Balearic sounds of summer and the icy kosmische sounds of winter to a venue near you, Free School are maximalist and minimalist all at once. But in a good way. The Birmingham duo signed to the internationally renowned Tirk label in 2011 and have just released their critically acclaimed LP ‘Tender Administration’, following two 12” releases and a string of remixes for the likes of Roots Manuva and Phil Oakey. Their cosmic delights have won the support of DJs Jacques Renault, Justin Robertson, Red Rack’em, Pete Gooding, Disco Bloodbath, The Big Chill and Future Disco.
Together with powerhouse drummer Simon Weaver and sensuous/deviant singer Greg Bird, the band have played live supporting Andrew Weatherall, Walls, Mark E and Fujiya & Miyagi and have recently performed at Croatia’s disco Mecca ‘The Garden Festival’. Free School have been performing a live show to win the hearts and minds of….well, people like you. Yes, you. Taking retro- futurist disco as a starting point, Free School have fused together Electro, House, Balearic, and Kosmiche to arrive at “a new sound….one that’s never been heard before….”* They may or may not be wearing masks of lamb.**
*Quote not actually said in reference to Free School. But it does feature in one of their songs, so the point stands. **Not actual lamb. They’re made of some sort of rubber/latex composite. But they look like lambs, so the point stands.

http://wearefreeschool.com/

Modified Toy Orchestra explore the hidden potential and surplus value latent inside redundant technology; a process creating sophisticated new electronic instruments from abandoned children’s toys.  They have been at the forefront of a worldwide underground movement called circuit bending, which involves rescuing children’s electronic toys and converting them into new strange and wonderfully sophisticated musical instruments. Taking them apart, they find new connections hidden within each toys circuit that reveal new sounds, thus exposing the surplus value of redundant technology.  Toys are reassembled, including switches and dials with which to control this surplus value. The results of this process can be shockingly beautiful, funny and also extreme.

http://www.modifiedtoyorchestra.com/

Nicholas Bullen is an artist and composer whose work encompasses a range of fields and media (including performance, sound art, installations, text, and film).
Beginning as a founder member of the ‘extreme’ music group Napalm Death at the age of 13, he has a 30 year history of composition (releasing over 40 recordings and developing graphic scores for ensemble performance) and live performance (both solo and collaboratively).
His performance for Supersonic combines an improvised sound field (combining concrete edits and metallic abrasions with extended gas tone drifts and radiator drones, exclusively composed from electronically processed field recordings) and an excerpt from his film The Inverse Heliograph, an abstract meditation on memory constructed from up to four layers of Super 8mm cine film which have been overlaid, re-framed, temporally altered and re-photographed through coloured lenses.

Warm Digits is the krautophonic blizzard-wave duo of Andrew Hodson and Steve Jefferis, based either side of the Pennines in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Manchester. Warm Digits make a semi-improvised brew of metronomic rhythms, snowstorm guitar and radiophonic electronics, dual-laptop electro, swathes of no-wave guitar and frantic free jazz drumming, taking their cue from the hypnotic repetition of Neu!, the textural overload of My Bloody Valentine, the glacial otherworldliness of Emeralds, and the sensuous modernity of cosmic disco; there are hints in the mix too of Eno, Giorgio Moroder and Holy Fuck.

http://warmdigits.co.uk

It would be near impossible to celebrate 10 years of Supersonic without PCM. This duo have been at the heart of the Birmingham electronic/dance music scene for many years but have managed to keep their music and ethos resolutely underground.

PCM draw from their wide-ranging influences from metal to Krautrock, 60s psychedelia and hardcore to create a unique take on Drum & Bass/electronica. By combining nitrous-fuelled beats and filthy subsonic basslines with alien soundscapes and horror movie unease, PCM continue Birmingham’s heritage of producing dark, heavy music but with their eyes firmly on the dancefloor.

http://www.myspace.com/p_c_m

“We don’t know who they are, or how many of them there are, because articles about them are generally accompanied by celebrity photo montages, or by a shot of them with a T-shirt pulled over their heads. Enigmatic and elusive, they may have named themselves after the US video director because they enjoy his work, or it may be a wry comment on something or other. We have seen them spoken of as an “18-year ‘relay project'” in which members pass on the baton one to another once their endeavours are complete. We really haven’t a clue.

Hype Williams take elements from the past and turn them into something new. You’ve heard that said of many artists before, right? This time it’s true. We like to let our imaginations run riot and think of them as a latterday Throbbing Gristle, a bunch of art terrorists doing abusive, subversive things to mainstream pop culture from the margins.” The Guardian

http://www.myspace.com/hypheewilliams

Promoting exciting new label Small But Hard with heavy as anything artists, including…
Koyxeи is one of the many aliases of Kouhei Matsunaga, when in his Hip Hop/Breakbeat guise with vocalists & MCs.
C_C – after listening to a lot of jungle, dub and breakcore, Eduardo Ribuyo had his brains blown when he met NHK, aka Kouhei Matsunaga. The ensuing metamorphosis brought us C_C, master of handmade beats and analogue feedback loops. Taking k7 tapes as his primary material, and sourcing sounds from anything and everything, C_C produces heavily textured music breathing, repetitious, and deep. Live performances envelop, soupy and treacly, moving incognito through his signature improvised flow.
Devilman comprises of three strong individual talents, Shige (DJ Scotch Egg) on bass, Gorgonn (Dokkebi Q) live mixing, and Taigen Kawabe (Bo Ningen) providing vocals. They are part of a secret underground organisation fronted by the mysterious MR. D.
DJ Scotch Bonnet is the new solo project of Shigeru Ishihara, aka DJ Scotch Egg. A maverick, crazed with energy and excess creativity, Ishihara’s chance meeting with Matsunaga Kouhei spurred an isotopic explosion of activity and inspiration; the result was new dope style distorted bass and beats
Kakawaka makes noise. The lunatic who took over the asylum, Kawakawa merrily blends childish tomfoolery with mind mangling noise. Abrasive sound sculptures beat you into submission until you are sick on the carpet. He spits in your eye and pisses on your face. For thus it is written in the great journal of musical endeavour that someone somewhere will achieve maximum joy from this unholy racket.

http://www.small-but-hard.com/

SOUNDkitchen’s cinema for the ears

SOUNDkitchen is a collective of sound artists and composers bringing new and experimental sounds to Birmingham through exciting line-ups, eclectic electronic performances and collaborations.  We’ve got some more information on what they’ll be presenting at Supersonic and have picked out some highlights here.  These performances all run 12-8pm so they’re ideal for checking out before the bands start later in the afternoons.

Saturday 22nd October

2-3pm: BEAST (Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre). A multi-channel work curated by Jonty Harrison.
4-4.30pm: Imaginary Landscapes – Through the Moors.  This piece tracks a journey made by Chris Tarren from his home in York out to the North-East coast, featuring multi-channel spatialisation, field recordings and experimentation that varies the sensations of reality in the material used.
5-6pm: Entre Terre et Ciel by Annie Mahtani and Julien Guillamat. Based on field recordings made around the village of Azet in the Pyrenees, this interesting piece features sounds from varying altitude levels from the bottom of a valley right up to a mountain path.

Sunday 23rd October

2-3pm: BEAST performance 2.
4-4.30pm: Iain Armstrong performs a laptop set of raw and processed sounds, focussing on aspects of noise.
4.30-5pm:  Shelly Knotts processes the sound of the steel pan, weaving intricate metallic textures in an improvisation across SOUNDkitchen’s installation.

In addition, there are installations present for the duration of the festival. SOUNDkitchen will be airing field recordings and composed pieces in their site-specific installation. They’ve asked a variety of collaborators to produce work that ties in with Capsule’s Home of Metal exhibition by producing work along the themes of home and metal.

soundkitchenuk.org

Lucky Dragons and The Berg Sans Nipple to play Kids Gigs at Supersonic 2011

It’s hard to imagine to two more perfect bands to play our Supersonic Kids Gigs than Lucky Dragons and The Berg Sans Nipple.  These will rule!   If everyone isn’t running around clapping and smiling in five minutes, we’ll need to think about refunds.

Lucky Dragons are all about people coming together to make sound, to make an event, to make something new and joyous.  It’s not by accident that they refer to their live shows as ‘actions’.  They encourage participation and this Supersonic live show promises to be all about (re)discovery and (re)turning to play to learn about ourselves and make new connections.  There’s a live video link below and more Lucky Dragons live films are here.

The Berg Sans Nipple are a Frenchman and a Nebraskan.  With two drums, synths, samples, a ton of percussion and vocals, their sounds hop-skip past each other, caught in devastatingly beautiful melodies held tight by a mind bending rhythm section.  Their new video ‘Changing the Shape’ (link below) is a fantastic twist on the age-old game of exquisite corpse where an image or story is built up person-by-person using instinct and imagination.  Let’s play!

http://thebergsansnipple.tumblr.com

http://www.hawksandsparrows.org/

The Berg Sans Nipple – Change The Shape from Clapping Music on Vimeo.

Supersonic interviews

A number of websites have been asking Capsule for our take on the festival – why we do it, highlights from previous years, things to watch for this year. Check out our take on things below via Rockfeedback and Wiki Festivals.

Rockfeedback interview link

Wikifestivals interview link

New inteview with Alva Noto

Our friends over at the ever-excellent ATTN magazine have just published an interesting interview with Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto ahead of his appearance at Supersonic 2011.  Take a look here.

attnmagazine.co.uk/feature/4768

Fonal Records is an independent record label from Finland that has been releasing experimental music since 1995. Initially established by Sami Sänpäkkilä to release his own recordings under the name Es, Fonal is a truly independent record label in every sense and now has over 80 releases to its name, This music video screening presents a variety of techniques ranging from animation to live action. Videos have been shot with mobile phones, super 8, 16mm film and Red One cameras, and all have been made with a zero budget. This special programme includes work from such label luminaries as Lau Nau, Kemialliset Ystävät, Paavoharju, Islaja and Shogun Kunitoki.

fonal.com

Eleanoora Rosenholm: Valo kaasumeren hämärässä from Sami Sänpäkkilä on Vimeo.

SOUNDkitchen

SOUNDkitchen is a collective of sound artists and composers bringing new and experimental sounds to Birmingham through exciting line-ups, eclectic electronic performances and collaborations with various local and national organisations. SOUNDkitchen aims to present anything and everything that’s experimental and electronic, crossing genres from electroacoustic to soundscapes to noise to ambient drones to Afrobeat, Dubstep, Balkan music and many more.

For Supersonic 2011, SOUNDkitchen will present two works.  They’ll be resident in a special area where they will be serving-up audio delights in their Cinema for the Ears. Working in collaboration with BEAST (Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre), they promise a concoction of installations and performances in a site-specific immersive sound sculpture.  Secondly, they will provide a live soundscape/soundtrack to Imperfect Cinema‘s screening of films made by festival-goers attending the latter’s workshop.

soundkitchenuk.org

New Spotify playlist

We’ve announced more new artists since our last Spotify playlist so, to make your listening experience simple and seamless, here’s a link to an updated version.  Now with added Mike Watt, Drum Eyes, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Klaus Kinski, DJ Scotch Egg, Drumcunt and Orthodox.  Enjoy!  (But our sincere apologies for those horrible meerkat adverts.)

http://open.spotify.com/user/littleredrabbit/playlist/1G2nW0tTKUmIoANAR4t14a

Cloaks Q&A #11
On the 3by3 label, Cloaks play speaker-shredding blasts of dubstep noise.  Beats skip, jump and judder while all manner of found sounds build up into layers of ambient scree.  Cloaks’ music is a harsh listen but all the more devastating and exciting for that.  Here, mainman Steve Harris answers our Q&A.

1. Which five words describe what you know about Supersonic?
Important, unique, raw, adult, anti-hype (substance)

2. What can people expect of Cloaks at the festival?
You should expect to hear a more experimental, noise-driven approach to our music. We will also be predominantly playing unheard material from our album in progress.

3. Why make music – what does it do for you that nothing else does?
That’s a great question, and one I couldn’t ever answer sufficiently.

4. Who else on the bill are you hoping to see?  (And why?)
Part Chimp, Alva Noto, Scorn, White Hills, The Skull Defekts. Supersonic always has a culture of ‘new’ as well so the point of it for me in terms of seeing other acts is all the names I’ve never heard of. The chief reason the festival is so great is that you discover new things so I’m looking forward to being pleasantly surprised.

5. Finally, your essential ‘surviving-Supersonic’ items are…
Earplugs, a large supply of disposable income for the marketplace, promo materials to hand out, spare bag to store all the new stuff you just bought, spare earplugs.

www.3by3music.com

A Supersonic favourite and Japan’s noisiest export, Shigeru Isihara never completed Tetris as a child. So now he wreaks his vengeance upon the world, armed with a Gameboy and a megaphone. Due to collaborating with just about everyone in the music industry, the Scotch Egg sound is constantly evolving and is bound to touch on something you’ll enjoy. …That is when your hearing finally returns..
http://www.myspace.com/djscotchegg

A Brighton/London based collective arranged around Shigeru Ishihara (better known as DJ Scotch Egg), E-Da (Ex-Boredoms drummer), and K-Power (Ex-power up!) Drum Eyes combine dueling drums, cornets, keys and game boys to form a devastating live show.

Their debut album dropped in September 2010 amidst feverish anticipation in the wake of member’s reputations and the band’s devastation of audiences countrywide with their insatiable, mind expanding live performances including a set at Supersonic festival in 2009.

http://www.myspace.com/drumeyes

Modulate are an audio visual collective who first came together in 2001 through a shared interest in electronic music and abstract art. Over the years, Modulate’s output has had three main strands: curating and producing events and projects, developing their own audio-visual compositions and performances, and creating multi-speaker sound installations. A concurrent theme has been an interest in modulating spaces and creating abstract symbolic realms of sound and audio-visual expression.

http://www.modulate.org.uk

As a member of San Francisco legends Tarentel and Type’s premier astral travellers The Alps, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma is hardly a new addition to the label, so it’s hard to believe that ‘Love Is A Stream’ is his first Type solo album. Previously releasing on Arbor, Spekk and his own Root Strata imprint, this latest album marks his journey into the beautifully cacophonous world of dream pop.

Shoegaze music has been much maligned in recent years, probably due to its rebirth and subsequent explosion of popularity (which gave rise to hundreds of young bands aping the over twenty-year-old sound). However it was only a fragment of the genre that these bands attempted to re-create, and on ‘Love Is A Stream’ Cantu, instead of focusing on tired weeping melancholy ballads, focuses solely on expansive, almost noise-ridden hopefulness. This is the kind of noise we fell in love with when My Bloody Valentine blew our ear drums performing ‘Loveless’, or the kind of harmonic excess we heard on hundredth listen to Catherine Wheel’s ‘Ferment’, but taken into deeper, more abstract realms.

http://www.myspace.com/jcledesma

Meet FIRE! (+ Oren Ambarchi)

This is a real coup for Supersonic 2011 and we’re immensely proud to bring these artists together.  Operating in a free zone that’s not afraid to groove, to open up space or to pummel the senses with frantic assault, FIRE! are a living, breathing organism.  An organism that at Supersonic will be joined by the minimal guitar composer Oren Ambarchi.  Who, then, are FIRE!?

1. Mats Gustafsson – sax/electronics
Gustafsson is a sax player, improviser, live electonics manipulator and composer who sounds as if he’s melded with his instrument.  Born in 1964 in Umeå, Northern Sweden, he’s been seen in the UK most recently as part of the Brass Unbound collective playing with legendary Dutch DIY team The Ex.  But he’s also worked in projects with the likes of Peter Brötzmann, Sonic Youth, Merzbow and Otomo Yoshihide, and is seems to be never afraid of what each situation will bring.  If that wasn’t enough, he’s also a producer of international festivals and concert tours as well as running his own record labels Slottet, OlofBright Editions and Blue Tower Records.

2. Johan Berthling – bass
Johan Berthling was born in Stockholm 1973. Since studying at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Stockholm (1996-1998) he has worked as a freelance with jazz, improvised music and more. One of his main projects is the minimal, experimental pop outfit Tape, of whom The Wire recently said, “Tape organically blend balsa-light acoustic textures (guitars, percussion, winds and brass) with a range of organs and a gentle yet firm digital pressure.”

3. Andreas Werlin – drums/percussion
Born 1982 in the vast snow of northern Sweden and later on raised on the small west coast village Strömstad, Andreas Werlin is best known for the inventive electro-percussive band Wildbirds & Peacedrums that he shares with his wife Mariam Wallentin. Their 2007 debut album saw them awarded the Swedish Jazz Act of the Year award, which gives you some idea of just how varied and original Andreas’ work is.  With improvisational music at the heart of his playing, he is today a part of many acclaimed bands like Wildbirds & Peacedrums, Dan Berglund’s Tonbruket and Loney Dear. Werlin has also written music for theater and film.

4. Oren Ambarchi – guitar
In his own words when asked what people can expect of his collaboration with FIRE!, Ambarchi says:
“In all honesty I don’t know what to expect as the Supersonic show will be the first time we’ve worked together. Additionally I’ll be flying all the way from Australia for 30+ hrs, landing at Heathrow, driving straight to Birmingham and hitting it immediately so…it should be awesome, hahaha.”

There you go.  Don’t worry about FIRE! – it’ll just be awesome.

FIRE! site

Meet Astro

Hiroshi Hasegawa was in the band C.C.C.C., one of the biggest Japanese noise groups, and Astro is his solo project.
Born in 1963, Hasegawa first worked on improvisation with just his voice and drums before forming C.C.C.C  in 1989.  Astro began in 1993 as a project using analog synthesizers.  He formed Cosmic Coincidence as a new configuration of C.C.C.C. in 2010 with the members Manuel Knapp and Rohco.  To date, he has released an enviable 50+ releases across all his projects.  Throughout, Hiroshi describes his playing style as “like drifting between the meditation and awakening state with electronics”.  Astro in the recent past plays with electronic-noise, frequently an assault on both his equipment and the audience.  It’s as close to a rock-band destroying its gear in last-rites death throes as we’ve seen in the recent electronics scenes.  Judge for yourself in the clips below.

Astro on Facebook

Theme of the day: bowed strings

We’re always making links between the disparate worlds of artists here at Supersonic and today we bring together three unique artists who all share a simple common bond.  Pekko Kappi, Tony Conrad and Agathe Max all use bowed instruments in their music, all with very different techniques and to different ends, each highly skilled.

Finland’s Pekko Kappi plays the Jouhikko, the ancient Finnish-Karelian bowed lyre.  He got involved with the Jouhikko in 1997 in the Ala-Könni–institute of Kaustinen and ever since has been studying the tradition with the master players of Finland, Estonia and Sweden.   This particular lyre was played with a bow as early as in the European Middle Ages although in the area around the Baltic Sea there is evidence of both bowed and plucked lyres. In Estonia and Eastern Finland the Jouhikko remained in use until the beginning of the 20th century.  Kappi is one of a number of players investigated this instrument and bringing it alive for new generations.

Tony Conrad is a legendary figure in both film and music for many people.  He was an early member of the New York-based ensemble The Dream Syndicate alongside La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela and John Cale, using continuous tones to create what they called ‘dream music’.  Conrad’s first musical release was 1972’s ‘Outside the Dream Syndicate’ collaboration with Faust (check out our Spotify playlist for a track from that) but he released very little work until a series of box sets in the past decade.  His film work is justifiably lauded too and his early piece ‘The Flicker’ is considered a landmark of the late 1960s structural film movement.  One more fact?  His father was Arthur Conrad who worked with Everett Warner during World War II designing dazzle camouflage for the US Navy.

Agathe Max is a violinist from Lyon, France.  With an elegant command of melody and a strident use of rhythm, Max creates dynamic, fast-flowing loop pieces that encompass noise, post-classicism and krautrock with nods to the High Lonesome Raga as filtered through Henry Flynt.  Her current album ‘This Silver String’ has been really well received in many places.  “Agathe Max delivers a drone to keep the earth turning on its axis, with a keen and romantic sense of swing. Everything you need to have a good time” – Jonathan Kane.

Check these three unique artists below.

Agathe Max @ Grrrnd Zero (Lyon, France) from S etant chaussee on Vimeo.

Lucky Dragons and The Berg Sans Nipple to play Kids Gigs at Supersonic 2011

It’s hard to imagine to two more perfect bands to play our Supersonic Kids Gigs than Lucky Dragons and The Berg Sans Nipple.  These will rule!   If everyone isn’t running around clapping and smiling in five minutes, we’ll need to think about refunds.

Lucky Dragons are all about people coming together to make sound, to make an event, to make something new and joyous.  It’s not by accident that they refer to their live shows as ‘actions’.  They encourage participation and this Supersonic live show promises to be all about (re)discovery and (re)turning to play to learn about ourselves and make new connections.  There’s a live video link below and more Lucky Dragons live films are here.

The Berg Sans Nipple are a Frenchman and a Nebraskan.  With two drums, synths, samples, a ton of percussion and vocals, their sounds hop-skip past each other, caught in devastatingly beautiful melodies held tight by a mind bending rhythm section.  Their new video ‘Changing the Shape’ (link below) is a fantastic twist on the age-old game of exquisite corpse where an image or story is built up person-by-person using instinct and imagination.  Let’s play!

http://thebergsansnipple.tumblr.com

http://www.hawksandsparrows.org/

The Berg Sans Nipple – Change The Shape from Clapping Music on Vimeo.