As a powerful and loud guitar/drum duo, Lightning Bolt comparisons come cheap….the Flower/Corsano Duo are something else – more like a punk-jazz-trash Konono No.1 or an Eastern sound, opiate-fixated Harry Pussy. As a duo they have that special power to elevate through noise, rhythm and primal harmonix. An exhilarating sight/sound that shudders the body and cleanses the mind. Obsessive stuff.
An improviser, composer, and an intrepid explorer on electric and acoustic guitar. There is a fair amount of experimentation involved in much of his string-work which can lead to audio realms rarely visited by others. Richard is perhaps best known as a founding member (along with brother Alan Bishop) of experimental ethnic-improv pioneers and underground tricksters Sun City Girls, who formed in 1981.
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.
If you think the Capsule ladies sit around twiddling their thumbs between Supersonics, think again! 2011 has been an incredible year for our most ambitious project to date with exhibitions, live events and a conference all celebrating Birmingham and the Black Country as the birthplace of Heavy Metal. The project is ongoing and you can contribute to the Home of Metal digital archive and learn more here www.homeofmetal.com
Impassioned by the social conditions of the time and inspired by anarcho-punk bands who were taking an anti-capitalist stance through their music, Nicholas Bullen and Miles ‘Rat’ Ratledge formed Napalm Death. At only 14 years old, they were motivated to play gigs, create fanzines, and swap music via cassette tapes with the wider punk community. This exhibition will give you an exciting insight into this period of music history – the formation of Grindcore.
No strangers to Supersonic, here are Napalm Death performing at the fest in 2010:
A Supersonic Quiz hosted by Club Unlikely
Sunday 23rd starts 2.30pm in 70eights
Flaunt your collective musical nous in this unique contest to determine the Trivia Champs at Supersonic 2011. It’s free to enter and you can field a team of anything between 2 and 6 people. The quiz starts at 2.30pm so please have your teams registered and ready to fire for 2.15pm.
Think you know your Electric Funeral from your Electric Wizard? Well, Bring it on!
A very special opportunity to hear a legend in the sonic and visual art world speak about this work. Tony Conrad will be in conversation at this year’s festival with the help of the ever inquisitive The Quietus.
Tony will be discussing his long line of collaborative work, plus giving us an insight into early days having worked with Velvet Underground and other such luminaries. Tony will also be discussing his cross artform approach, moving between the world of visual art, film and sound.
Extracts from Tony Conrad’s influential structural film ‘The Flicker’:
A special Q&A will see Whitehouse/Cut Hands man William Bennett, the influence of West African sounds on his own work, his new Afronoise project and his music’s inclusion on the Vice film.
VBS TV travels to Liberia in West Africa to explore a country ravaged by years of civil war. Liberia was originally planned and founded as a homeland for former slaves back in 1821. But fast-forward over a century and a half, and a military coup, and you find the first Liberian Civil War as Charles Taylor’s US-backed opposition overthrows a government unfriendly to US interests. The film explores the current fate of the Liberian people and that of the warlords themselves.
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.
Eleanoora Rosenholm: Valo kaasumeren hämärässä from Sami Sänpäkkilä on Vimeo.
For Supersonic 2011, the festival organisers have invited some of their favourite small press publishers to sell their books, comics and zines, including:
There will also be zines and an exhibition of artwork from Adam Cadwell, Carla Smith, Catherine Elms, Dina Kelberman, Joe List and many more. The zine celebrations will also be working their way into other aspects of Supersonic. ‘$100 and a t-shirt‘, Joe Biel’s documentary exploring the thoughts and experiences of zine-makers in North America, will be screened. In addition to this, a panel featuring Alex Zamora, Nic Bullen and Charlie Woolley will discuss the history of zines, their inspirations and how this feeds into modern DIY creativity and publishing.
Featuring Alex Zamora of Fever Zine, Nic Bullen, formerly of Napalm Death and Charlie Woolley, archivist of a unique collection of fanzines and political ephemera dating from the punk movement and its aftermath assembled by artist and collector Toby Mott. The panel will discuss the history of zines, their inspirations and the resurgence of zine culture.
Alex Zamora is a music and arts journalist who runs Fever Zine,a quarterly publication focusing on music , art and DIY culture.
http://www.feverzine.co.uk/
Nic Bullen is a musician and visual artist who co founded the band Napalm Death. Bullen collected and produced a number of zines during the 1980s.
Charlie Woolley is an artist and archivist of the Mott Collection. The collection is a fascinating piece of punk history and also includes political propaganda and memorabilia.
Dir:Dario Argento – 1977 – Italy
Dario Argento’s 70s masterpiece remains an iconic milestone in horror cinema, playing out as a hallucinatory onslaught of dreamlike imagery, atmosphere, colour and sound. Goblin’s legendary score will need little introduction to Supersonic fans.
This screening is part of Psychotronic Cinema’s late night horror at Supersonic. Psychotronic Cinema programmes cult classic films at UK cinemas and is responsible for the legendary “All Night Horror Madness” event and the upcoming “All Night Bad Movie Experience”.
Mike Watt is a u.s. bassist/composer/performer who’s home is in san pedro, california. he first got attention as a founding member (along w/d. boon) of the minutemen in the early 1980s. since then he was in fIREHOSE, dos and many other solo bands as well as a sideman bassist for porno for pyros, j mascis & the fog and currently (since 2003) iggy and the stooges. “hyphenated-man” is the third of what he calls punk rock opera due to them being album-long pieces put together in parts. the first one, “contemplating the engine room” dealt w/the story of the minutemen using his father’s life in the navy and the second one “the secondman’s middle stand” used parallels to dante’s “commedia” to deal w/an illness almost that almost killed him. opera number three takes on watt in moment, where he is in his life now and how he feels about it using various creatures in hieronymus bosch’s paintings as inspiration and metaphor.
With on tour this fall in europe are his missingmen tom watson (guitar) and raul morales (drums) who also were involved in the recording, the first release on his new label clenchedwrench.
for more info:
iconAclass is the new project from MC/producer Will Brooks best known as Dälek. As front person and co-producer in the group Dälek he explored the left of centre/ wall of noise world ala My Bloody Valentine meets Public Enemy on 6 studio albums.
iconAclass, his newest solo project, sees him maintaining the gritty view of boom-bap he is know for, while returning to his roots.
For the Ones is pure hip-hop, hypnotic heavy beats serve as more than just a backdrop for this MC. They focus a spotlight squarely on the lyrics, and iconAclass has a lot on his mind!
Pushing forward into the new millennia with DJ Motiv providing the cuts, iconAclass is the next chapter for this ever evolving musician.
http://www.facebook.com/iconaclass
Plymouth DIY Punk Cinema collective Imperfect Cinema will be inviting attendees at Supersonic Festival 2011 to contribute to an alternative documentation of the festival using endangered media technologies!
Participants will receive a workshop, both practical and theoretical, introducing them to Super-8 cinema and lo-fi modes of recording. Participants will then obtain their own recordings of the festival, documenting their experience of the event. Recordings will then be processed and edited to form a screening and performance of the work created.
The workshop will take place on Saturday 22nd October with exhibition of work taking place on Sunday 23rd October. This workshop is free to weekend ticket holders, but spaces are limited. Please email [email protected] to book a place on this workshop.
Imperfect Cinema provides avenues for participatory activity and aims to socialise a free, democratic short-form cinema by valorising do-it-yourself ethics.
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
Orthodox is a trio from Seville, Spain playing experimental doom metal, inspired by religious folklore and even jazz.
“We started with a concept”, could be read in the album cover of the seminal band Earth. The Spanish trio Orthodox could say the same. Their music, their performance, their artwork, everything is made in order to develop their own concept.
Their musical influences Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, Melvins and Sleep get mixed with their peculiar perception of the South-Spanish religious folklore. The result is a liturgical music with obsessive repetitions, minimalism, feedback, distortion and endless drones.
Ore are a drone doom tuba group. The Sound of Ore can be heard where classical, experimental and metal musics engage. The material is rare; a synthesis of musical elements. Ore forge the power and depth of brass with the care of craftsmen. It is the sound of Birmingham: its industrial heritage, metal-working origins and creative innovation.
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.
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.
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.
This captivating documentary is the product of five years of obsessive filming of live concert footage, exclusive interviews, and historic documentation focusing on three fiercely independent music labels and their bands.
Featuring Neurosis, ISIS, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Pelican, Oxbow, Evangelista, Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra, Cave In, and many others whose music and art found ideal homes in the artist-run record labels of Hydrahead, Neurot, and Constellation.
These labels combine hard-to-define, heavy music with a visual aesthetic that has enraptured worldwide fans, without the need for radio or corporate media outlets. They uphold the legacy of treating music as an art form, not as a product.
This film is an answer to those who question where the spirit of punk rock is today.
Over 20 bands and visual artists.
3 record labels.
1 philosophy.
“Blood, Sweat & Vinyl provides a keen glimpse into crucial corners of the modern music universe where corporate concerns are disregarded and the artists are given (and receive) the respect they deserve.”
– J. Bennett, Decibel Magazine
“It’s a goldmine of exclusive footage for fans, but it’s also a compelling piece for curious onlookers… It’ll make you proud to listen to this music.”
– Etan Rosenbloom, www.metalsucks.net
http://www.bloodsweatvinyl.com/
Blood, Sweat & Vinyl: DIY in the 21st Century (Trailer) from kenneth thomas on Vimeo.
The almighty Kings Of Deathpunk play a UK exlusive headline performance at Supersonic 2011. Bringing all the glam, good tunes and great vibes (and hopefully hordes of denim-clad followers) we couldn’t be more excited!
A Norwegian punk band formed in 1989, their style infuses glam rock, punk rock and hard rock into a style the band calls ‘Deathpunk’.
The line up includes, Tony Sylvester (Vocals), Happy Tom (Bass), Euroboy (Guitar), Pål Pot Pamparius (Keys/Guitar), Tommy Manboy (Drums/Percussion) and Rune Rebellion (Guitar). Tony Sylvester comments on playing the festival:
“I was so chuffed that Lisa and Jenny asked Turbonegro to headline Supersonic and that the first show with the new line up in the UK will be there. Not only are they the best promoters in the UK, but I’ve been lucky enough to have been involved with the festival itself since its second year: announcing bomb threats, swimming in the fountains, playing Northern Soul, arguing on panels, you name it. This will be the first time I’ve actually played there however!”
For more information you can visit www.turbonegro.com and follow them on twitter @TurbonegroHQ.
Formed in 2006 by Jon Porras and Evan Caminiti, Barn Owl use their guitars to paint broad musical strokes on a canvas stretched between the framework of ambient, drone, americana, and black metal. In 2010, this unique blend of stylistic references coalesced into their debut Thrill Jockey release, Ancestral Star, an album that marked the evolution of the Barn Owl sound intro something wholly their own, transcending the sum of its influences. The arrival of Ancestral Star fostered comparisons ranging from Sunn O))) to Ennio Morricone, often within the same critique.
The new material on Shadowland takes inspiration from the devotional sounds of Popol Vuh and Alice Coltrane and also possesses the pitch black weightlessness of Fushitsusha and early Tangerine Dream. With waves of guitar soaring over liquid synthesizers tones, Barn Owl combine lush, melancholic serenity with cacophonous, deconstructed guitar to exhibit a visceral meeting of light and dark.
http://www.myspace.com/barnowlband
Since 1992, Envy has become a dominant band in the independent
hard‐core scene in Japan. Since then they have pursued and succeeded in creating their own original style of music. Over the past 15 years, envy has become a dominant band in the independent scene in Japan. Their music, through their own evolution, encompasses a sound where intensity and beauty coexist.
Since the beginning, they have toured extensively throughout Japan as well
as Europe, US and Asia, gaining popularity and creating a solid growing international fan base along the way. They have released 4 full albums as well as several splits with such bands as Thursday, Jesu, Sixpence, Endeavor and TMK. Envy has supported bands such as Mogwai, ISIS, Converge, Explosions in the Sky, Locust, Lighting Bolt, Hot Cross.
They are one of the leading independent Japanese bands and widely considered to be one of the best live bands around, having labored and toured their songs relentlessly for over a decade, and will continue to do so.
Supersonic is produced by Capsule:
Unit 317, Zellig
Gibb Street
Birmingham UK
B9 4AT
