Dirty Electronics will be joined by long-term collaborator Nicholas Bullen (Napalm Death/Scorn) for a set featuring works from Dirty Electronics’ new album released on Mute Records, and pieces for the Supersonic commissioned Horn & Bells sound object. Over the last decade, John Richards (Dirty Electronics) and Bullen have worked together on numerous projects from releasing music as Black Galaxy to co-organising Fluxus events. Bullen has also written several performance pieces for the Dirty Electronics Ensemble. www.dirtyelectronics.org
Birmigham duo Steve Alcock and Andy Porteous take retro-futurist disco as a starting point, which we think is a pretty great beginning for anything, frankly. Their sound develops from there into a unique fusion of Electro, House, Balearic and Kosmiche. A couple of rubber lamb masks are the proverbial icing on the cake for a fun trip for all. www.soundcloud.com/free-school
Angharad Davies is a violinist, improviser and composer. She’s a specialist in the art of ‘preparing’ her violin, adding objects or materials to it to extend its sound making properties.
Angharad has performed at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, BBC Proms, is an associate artist at Cafe Oto and has played live with Tony Conrad in the Turbine Room at the Tate Modern. She has collaborated extensively with artists from around the world, including Kazuko Hohki, Tisha Mukarji, Lina Lapelyte, Dominic Lash, Rie Nakajima and Julia Eckhardt.
Listen to an extract from her piece, ‘Pizz, Nail File and Fingers Study’:
It’s a collaboration that simply cannot be understated. Dylan Carlson and Kevin Martin are both long established figures presiding over the radical fringes of heavy music, holding the attention of curious minds and audiences for over twenty years worldwide. Carlson, the mainstay of Seattle’s Earth, has created a volume of daring work that originates in distorted drone and expands over cinematic Americana, folkloric balladry and proto-rock, whilst Martin (as The Bug, Techno Animal, Ice, King Midas Sound) gained notoriety producing hulking hyrbids of dancehall, dub and techno that are unparalleled in tactility and dark aggression. As The Bug vs Earth, they released Boa / Cold for Ninjatune in December (listen here), and it is with great pleasure we can announce that they will be performing together for the first time ever, especially for Supersonic Festival. Following this performance, The Bug shall be joined on stage by Flowdan to round up proceedings on Saturday night in style.
A street musician from Prague who specialises in tradional and Medieval instruments, Jiří Wehle has had many musical incarnations in his life, but, in his words, has always followed the path of the troubadour.
Starting his musical life in the 1960’s where he played guitar in a rock and roll band, Wehle has been a prolific artist for over fifty years. After his father’s death in the 90’s, with whom he had a long-standing musical collaboration, he has gone on to play for The Estate Theatre in Prague, compose original music for Czech puppet-performer Pavel Vangeli, and take musical roles in several films.
Wehle also plays constantly in the streets, something which he continued to do throughout the Communist regime of the 1980’s and 1990’s. After this turbulent period in history, Wehle’s music became much more independent, and he also began to use Medieval instruments such as shawms, bagpipes, chalumeaus, krumhorns, cistras and hurdy-gurdy.
Sex Swing have only been in existence since mid-2014 but are already a firm favourite of The Quietus: ‘Moulded from members of Part Chimp, Mugstar and Dethscalator, Sex Swing could be any number of things. Will they lean more towards the vibe of Dethscalator, a dark channelling of early punk, down to the outrage baiting song titles such as ‘AIDS Atlas’ and ‘World War II Hitler Youth Dagger’? Could they be more infused with Part Chimp’s reverberating, distorted, Bronxesque new-wave punk? Perhaps they’ll side more with the psychedelic, drifting journeys of Mugstar. Maybe though, it’ll be a mix of all of the above, or even something more unique and bizarre.’
What little we do know about them includes their use of organ and saxophone, so take that for what it’s worth. Given the credentials of the members’ previous bands, we’re just as excited to find out as you. They feature Stu Bell on drums and Dan Chandler on vocals, reunited after the collapse of Dethscalator. Except Dan isn’t roaring like a minotaur who’s just stepped on an upturned plug with bare feet, he’s actually singing, and he sounds a little bit like Ian Curtis. Jase Stoll (Mugstar) adds chunky guitar, while Tim Cedar (Part Chimp) plays a mean Alan Vega style organ and Colin Webster is on a giant saxophone, itchily skronking away somewhere between Fela Kuti and Colin Stetson. I mean, I don’t want to jinx it or anything but they might actually be superb…
Woven Skull began playing together in 2008 in the empty sparse Irish countryside in a house owned by two of the members and located at the foot of Sheemore (a hill where two factions of fairies clash in an annual battle). These atmospheric surroundings helped to forge their music, which has been described as ‘minimal, repetitive, distorted, ugly and beautiful in one’. The trio spent several years experimenting with combinations of instrumentation, household objects, kitchen utensils, seashells, footsteps, chimes, recordings of cats purring and frogs mating while developing a sound that after a recent set was described as ‘a Turkish Velvet Underground.’
Within the group, song writing is split equally between Aonghus on densely propulsive guitar and Natalia on distorted mandola. The riffs Natalia composes are seeped deep in the Ukrainian lullabies and superstitions that surrounded her as a child and those that Aonghus writes stem from his past musical projects, which span from harsh noise to improv. These are glued together by the endless cyclical rhythms created by Willie and inspired by the sounds of the bogs and woods that surround his home: from syncopated cattle calls to the beating wings of bats in the night to the creaking of trees as they push against each other in the wind.
Woven Skull have recorded in dark haunted woods, beside bottomless lakes, and in the attics of abandoned houses. Their upcoming LP, Lair of the Glowing Bantling, is their first studio album and captures a sound that’s more in line with their live performance than past releases, which have been a mix of lo-fi practice tapes, outdoor recordings and segments from collaborative sets.
As Circuit des Yeux, Haley Fohr creates music that embodies the complexity of human emotions, juxtaposing tenderness and grief, ecstasy and horror, using sounds as representations of the emotional spectrum that we all experience.
Fohr’s striking, impassioned baritone is the centrepiece and guiding force of Circuit Des Yeux. Gravitating towards singers like Ma Rainey, Memphis Minnie, Etta James and Billy Holiday, her songs tap into the stark imagery of pre-war blues, folk and jazz, as well as also being influenced in equal parts by her study of ethnomusicology.
During an extensive period of touring in 2013, Fohr traveled solo: no band, no tour manager, no driver. In that solitude she learned to commune with the audience in a way that she hadn’t ever before. That connection sparked in her mind a conversation with the audience, and many of the lyrics on new album In Plain Speech convey an intimacy with the listener. Fohr also became acutely aware of disquiet, a pervasive anxiety, which permeated society in almost every city she visited. ‘I felt an uneasiness that superseded phonetic communication,’ she writes. ‘Something dim is in the air, and it is looming large.’
The solo musical guise of Glaswegian DIY protagonist Michael Kasparis, Apsotille was initially a creative harbour from his groups Please and The Lowest Form. With the imminent release of new album, Powerless, the project has grown into an explosive synth-punk project unafraid of both physicality and emotional leakage. Live Apostille is raw and unleashed, immersing the audience in his adrenaline surges of expression.
Fiercely independent in practice and execution, Apostille’s stated purpose is to bridge the gap between audience and performer, to connect through the fog of power structures and post-modernism and to ferment a direct pop music unconcerned with control.
Rhodri Davies plays harp, electric harp, live-electronics and builds wind, water, ice, dry ice and fire harp installations. He has released four solo albums: Trem, Over Shadows, Wound Response and An Air Swept Clean of All Distance.
His regular groups include: a duo with John Butcher, Cranc, HEN OGLEDD with Richard Dawson and Common Objects. He has performed, recorded or collaborated with the following artists: Derek Bailey, Laura Cannell, Jenny Hval, C Joynes, Kahimi Karie, Okkyung Lee, Phill Niblock, Jim O’Rourke, Bill Orcutt, Ben Patterson, Eliane Radigue, Otomo Yoshihide and John Zorn.
Phil Tylerplays Anglo-American folk music using guitar, banjo, voice and fiddle. From Newcastle upon Tyne, he has played in various folk, rock and ceilidh bands for many years. His music is steeped in a love of traditional narrative song, full-voiced sacred harp singing and sparse mountain banjo. Alongside his wife, Cath, Tyler has performed on stages as diverse as the Royal Opera House in London and a dank tower in the old city walls of Newcastle. Taking a more minimal approach to material than some, Tyler’s music penetrates to the very rawest essence of folk tradition.
Afework Nigussie is a musician and singer from Gondar in northern Ethiopia. He has a background in Azmari, the music of the wandering minstrels. The Azmari are the voices of freedom of expression in Ethiopia, improvising constantly, commenting on politics, religion and everyday life. Their style is very specific, both provocative and humorous. Nigusse has also trained at the National Theatre in Addis Ababa and, more recently, collaborated with The Ex.
Nigussie’s music celebrates the rich tradition of both secular and religious music in Ethiopia, which has resulted in a wide range of zefen (folk song). Zefen include songs to accompany iskista (dancing), fukara to celebrate the heroic deeds of warriors and musho and lekso to express sorrow at funerals. Singing forms the accompaniment of farming and comes to the fore at every pivotal moment of life. He also 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.
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.
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, theirpolitically-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.
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.
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.
London’s Zoltan head out into the world following the release of their “First Stage Zoltan” album on the Austrian label Cineploit.
Drawing from their long-standing interests in vintage sci-fi paperbacks and obscure horror soundtracks, Zoltan bring you menacing chordal sweeps, cinematic synthscapes and relentless, angular rhythms, with ambient interludes, Giorgio-Moroder-from-hell sequencers and bone-shaking crescendos. Banks of vintage synths are underpinned by a driving rhythm section, infusing the intricacy of prog with a repetitive, psychedelic energy. For fans of Goblin and Heldon.
Mainlining a torrent of psycho-delic, reverb drenched, doomsday motorik and improvised sounds is the master and mystery of Gnod. Audiences have come to expect bizarre humanoid toasting over cosmic synth eeriness pinned down with a combination of duelling deep-vein-thrombosis juggernaut riffs and heart-pounding beats. Gnod explore the possibilities of a big, awesome sound with an uncompromising aesthetic.
To date the band have releases with Not Not Fun (USA), Blackest Rainbow (UK). Tamed Records (France) and Rocket Recordings (UK) to name a few and are gaining a cult following on the live scene in grimy venues & dark club spaces all over Europe with their head-spinning, mind-bending, bowel-shaking live shows.
A much-loved musical spectacle in his native Newcastle for many years now, Richard Dawson is a skewed troubadour who sings and plays guitar with a rare intensity and a very singular style. Dawson’s music is a collision of opposites, his hoarsely cracking voice suddenly rising to a magical soar that’s been compared to Tim Buckley, John Martyn and Richard Youngs, while his battered acoustic guitar veers from stumble to sublime in a way that can recall Sir Richard Bishop or Captain Beefheart. Add this to his snaring way with words and Dawson’s got you pinned
Dragging themselves towards their tenth anniversary like a sloth in a heavy metal parking lot, Mothertrucker are no strangers to the almighty riff. They’ve crafted a sound built on thick dirty distortion, menacing atmospherics, head bopping tempo changes and rewarding climaxes. Not content to sit alongside the navel gazing, post-metal, Neurosis wannabes so prevalent this century, Mothertrucker have evolved their sound into something far more unpredictable without losing sight of what brought them together in the first place – the power of the riff. Once you have found yourself trapped in the headlights of the Mothertrucker, you can but only lay back, stretch your sack & make peace with your maker.
Masami Akita performs as Merzbow. Since 1979 he has been a hugely influential practitioner on the fields of sound art, noise and extreme music. Abrasive and restrained in equal measure, Merzbow is considered to be the most important artist in noise music.
Apathy is everything to these five losers who’ll just about manage to turn up and play without being sick.
Lo-fi grit and metal maledom are fractured and recombined into monotone slabs which reference distaste for modern life as much as they poke fun at the traditions of the punk/hardcore idiom. Still barely functioning after four years of staring at the walls and occasional live performance, the band will finally have their debut album and a split 7″ record with Kilslug in tow with them for the latter part of 2012. All proceeds will be spent on plastic surgery.
Unpredictable guitar combo pairing Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth and free-noise guitarist Bill Nace.
KIM GORDON
A founding member of Sonic Youth – where she plays bass and guitar and sings, Kim Gordon has also been involved in numerous collaborations with other artists and musicians including Julie Cafritz and Yoshimi in Free Kitten, Mirror/Dash with Thurston Moore and others including Lydia Lunch, Vincent Gallo, and Yoko Ono. With an extensive history in the world of art, both as an artist, writer and curator Gordon has maintained ongoing creative relationships with visual artists such as Dan Graham, Raymond Pettibon, Mike Kelley, Jutta Koether and Richard Prince and exhibited her own installation work across the US, Japan and Europe.
BILL NACE
Guitarist Bill Nace has ripped a new black hole in the free rock universe as a constant, energising presence in the Boston area performing with Chris Corsano in Vampire Belt (and together with Jessica Rylan as Vampire Can’t), Thurston Moore in Northampton Wools, x.0.4 with Jake Meginsky & John Truscinski and a coruscating duo with free reed player Paul Flaherty. His collaborations even extended to a short-lived association with Brighton noiseniks Dylan Nyoukis & Karen Constance (aka Blood Stereo) under the Ceylon Mange moniker.
