Supersonic in The Virgin Trains Magazine.

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We’ve been getting some pretty interesting coverage of late. First Glamour Magazine and now Hotline, Virgin Trains onboard magazine.

The article features an interview with Lisa, covering the festivals history and some of the bands that are playing this year. Here it is, click the image to enlarge::

Or, if you’re traveling on a Virgin Train, flick through to page 37.
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Countdown to Supersonic – 11 days to go

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Calling Birds – Turn is the second in Ben Waddington’s series of illustrations on beermats; counting down the days to Supersonic Festival  2010.

Follow Ben on twitter

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Calling Birds – the countdown to Supersonic

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Local historian, illustrator and Supersonic regular Ben Waddington has created a series of illustrations to mark the countdown to the festival:

Calling Birds:
Ben Waddington’s illustration sequence for Supersonic mirrors the countdown of the 12 Days of Christmas, borrowing classic Capsule iconography.

Perry


Follow Ben on twitter

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Supersonic Extra Curricular Activity in Fused Mag.

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There is a little run down of the extra curricular activity that is taking place as part of Supersonic Festival in Fused Magazine this month. Here’s the scanned in article:

But, that maybe too small for you to read, in which case click here and scroll through to page 62.
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Swans first show

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Swans deliver a blistering set from the Trocadero on the first day of their tour and record release in Philly. We can’t wait!

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More Peter Broderick And Mothlite

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Mothlite joined the Supersonic line up earlier this week with the final wave of additions. Mothlite is a collaboration between Daniel O’Sullivan and Antti Uusimak.  Daniel works with a mind-boggling array of bands; if you’ve ever listened to Ulver, Guapo, Æthenor, Sunn O))) and Aethenor (amongst others) then you’ve been listening to him, and if you liked them, chances are you’ll like Mothlite too.  This is the trailer for their forthcoming LP ‘Dark age’::

We told you about Peter Broderick last week, but since then this video has been released. Shot in the studio during the recording of ‘Guilt’s Tune’ from his LP ‘How They Are’, sometimes a video can illuminate something you wouldn’t notice when listening to a record, for example: simultaneous guitar and piano playing…

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Supersonic e-flyer

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Final acts announced for Supersonic

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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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Fully booked

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

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Supersonic On The Radio

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On Monday we’re opening RADIO IPS, a six day long programme of live and pre-recorded music, performances, readings and interviews, broadcast live from the International Project Space.  We’re going to be playing records from each year of Supersonic, starting with the first band that played that year, and finishing with the last.

Here’s a photograph of us preparing our records::

If you’d like to request a song, leave a comment below, and in a gesture to broadcasting democracy, we’ll consider it.

You can tune in here, or if you live within a ten mile radius, 88.9FM is where you’ll find us.  Be sure not to miss it – its going to be packed full of great records and hilarious anecdotes.  We’re on from 12 – 5 PM.
x
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The Quietus vs Hallogallo

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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

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Motorik Skills

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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

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Meet Peter Broderick.

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Peter Broderick’s songs are so fragile as you listen to them you’re worried that they are about to shatter into tiny little shards of sadness and fade away. He makes bittersweet, post classical, minimal folk, reminiscent of Arthur Russell, Jackson Browne or Max Richter. Peter’s been made recommended viewing by Rough Trade guy Spencer Hickman, so make sure you catch him and make your life a tiny bit better.

www.myspace.com/peterbroderick

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Action Hero

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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.

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The Quietus talk to Swans

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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

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Meet Pierre Bastien And Male Instrumenty

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Pierre Bastien and Male Instrumenty make an intriguing combination, basically creating a philharmonic orchestra out of handmade Meccano robots and a variety of small childrens instruments and toys. The robots have got the thumb pianos, castanets, steel drum and marimbas covered, while Pierre plays stand-up bass, electric piano, organ and horns. As you could have guessed, it sounds pretty unique but, for conceptual work it’s actually really accessible.

Here’s Piere and the robots playing:: (this is kind of amazing!)

and here’s Male Instrumenty::

I can’t wait to see them performing together!
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Fear Of Music

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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

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Meet Gum Takes Tooth

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Gum Takes Tooth are London-based trio Valentina Magaletti (out of electronic noise types Shit & Shine), Thomas Fuglesang (out of Agaskodo Teliverek), and Jussi Brightmore (out of Infants). Here’s the deal: Thomas’ drums are physically wired to a table of homemade gadgets, which are controlled by Jussi, who uses the gadgets to modulate and distort the signal coming from the drums. The result of this electronic wizardry is a thunderous rampage of no wave noise, grunge and acid.

There isn’t that much live footage of them online, but lucky for us someone has recorded them on their shaky camera phone, and the sound and video are pretty good::

http://www.myspace.com/gumtakestooth

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Grand Union

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Grand Union presents Hiker Meat by artist Jamie Shovlin

Grand Union presents an exhibition by London based artist Jamie Shovlin. His latest project Hiker Meat examines the degree to which a film director (or artist) has control over their works’ intended message, meaning and historical legacy, exploring the inherent tension within processes of collaboration and adaptation in any creative endeavour.
The project is a partial adaptation of an earlier work by Shovlin, Lustfaust: A Folk Anthology 1976-81 (2003-6), an archive of material created by the fans and musicians of a fictional German noise band. Contained within this archive is a narrative sketch for an exploitation film entitled Hiker Meat, for which Lustfaust composed the soundtrack. Using these found notes as a starting point Shovlin is producing a large body of work which acts as a homage to, and deconstruction of, exploitation horror films of the 1970s and 80s.
Unit 19, Fazeley Industrial Estate, Fazeley Street, Digbeth, Birmingham, B5 5RS
12-8pm Friday 22nd October, 12-6pm Saturday 23 October, 12-4pm Sunday 24th October.
FREE ENTRY
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Eastside Projects

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Eastside Projects presents: Local Myths by artist Jennifer Tee

Local Myths is the first UK exhibition of work by Jennifer Tee. Specially commissioned, Tee will construct a sculptural setting with allusions to a number of ideologically transformative inner structures, sanctums and theosophical spaces – ostensibly visible but not directly tangible. Tee will be transforming the gallery space to accommodate works that lie, stand and hang, reconsidering the materials, walls and floor of the building.

Eastside Projects are also hosting Gods White Noise with artist Christian Jendreiko on Saturday 23rd October 12 – 7pm

86 Heath Mill Lane, Digbeth, Birmingham, B9 4AR
Thursday 12 – 6.30pm, Friday to Sunday 12 – 5pm

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Ikon Eastside

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Ikon Eastside presents : AVPD

Ikon Eastside are hosting an exhibition by Danish duo AVPD. Hitchcock Hallway makes reference to director Alfred Hitchcock, whose use of architectural motifs in his films typically enhanced the psychological intensity of the narrative. The gallery entrance has been replaced by a door that you’re invited to enter. However, all is not what it seems as your journey through the exhibition will challenge your spatial and perceptual awareness and you will begin to feel increasingly claustrophobic. AVPD have also produced a number of off-site projects around Birmingham: Conceal at Ikon’s Brindleyplace gallery, and Level and Rotoobjects which take place throughout the city.

Since starting forty years ago as a small kiosk in Birmingham’s Bullring, Ikon has developed a reputation for innovation, internationalism and excellence. Ikon have been presenting an ambitious programme of exhibitions, artists’ residencies, talks and events in Digbeth, since November 2005.

183 Fazeley Street, Digbeth, Birmingham, B5 5SE
Thursday – Sunday 1 – 5pm

www.ikon-gallery.co.uk
FREE ENTRY

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Project Pigeon

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Project Pigeon presents: Philopersiteron Feipan

The folks from Project Pigeon, Alexandra Lockett and Ian England, are going to be coordinating a flyover the festival site on Saturday and Sunday afternoon.  Based in the Rea Gardens on Floodgate Street, Project Pigeon explores how art, sport, education and curating can co-exist and what sporting sub-cultures can tell us about wider society and its systems, values, policies and ideologies.  Each pigeon will be wearing a different Philopersiteron Feipan whistle (or pigeon whistle) on their tail, which will create an amazing harmonic droning noise from across the pentatonic scale.  Think Red Arrows, but better, and a whole lot noisier.
The Rea Garden, 1-8 Floodgate Street, Digbeth, Birmingham, B5
Saturday 15.30 – 16.00, Sunday 13.30 – 14.00
FREE ENTRY

[jwplayer playlistid=”1542″]

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Sublime Frequencies – Palace Of The Winds

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Shot over the course of two years (2006-2008), Palace of the Winds is an intimate and dreamlike journey exploring the music of Saharawi culture from Guelmim in Southern Morocco to the Mauritanian capital of Nouakchott. With spectacular images from inhospitable landscapes, chimerical phenomena that transpire by the sheer remoteness of the land, and haunting indigenous music from a people that have long been shrouded in mystery, this is a genre-defying film of profound beauty. Explore the intoxicating tapestry of sight and sound that this obscure region has to offer through its most awe-inspiring musicians. Featuring live performances by Group Doueh, Group Marwani, Sadoum Oueld Aida and Group Bab Sahara.
[jwplayer mediaid=”1565″]
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Nisennenmondai set from 2009

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One of the highlights from Supersonic 2009 was all female Japanese trio Nisennenmondai, we loved them so much they’re back again this year. Enjoy this film footage taken of their relentless set, we can’t wait to see them perform again.

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