Friday
What's great about Capsule is how self-effacing they are - they go to great lengths to make clear that this is a limited edition festival, much smaller than it would usually be. They do this while providing two days of what would be a world-class line-up for any festival, let alone one taking place under a railway bridge in Digbeth. The weekend was much better than it had any right to be. But, having been twice before, this wasn't a surprise. At the very worst, you'll come away with a handful of names you will look up on Bandcamp or Bandsintown; at best you'll leave with a deep sorrow in your heart, and pine while sitting on the bus to work about the time you saw the bloke from Sly and the Family Drone in his pants, or Swans dust themselves off after every song from whatever shit was falling off the ceiling as they played, or eating some vegan chilli while the Custard Factory throbs behind you. I'd only ever been to the festival in its October incarnation, so going in the summer was a strange experience and detracted slightly from the doomy atmosphere. But who goes for the atmosphere? Who pays £40 for atmosphere? Fuck you if you pay that much for atmosphere, you're an idiot. The all-important drink situation was much improved as well - Purity ale stepped up their sponsorship, providing an entire craft beer bar at the main stage.
Basic House started the weekend with some a bit of noise on the main stage. What I really like about Basic House, and it really comes through when you see him live, is how organic it all sounds. I have a lot of time for digital noise that sounds digital (Merzbow), and I'm pretty sure Basic House is digital, but it has a very "found sound" feel to it. Does that sound dickish? I didn't see all of his set (in favour of the next act, sorry dude) but he managed to create, on a weirdly bright stage, quite a dark atmosphere.
Supersonic must be one of the only festivals in the world that puts the more experimental acts on a much bigger stage than the more straightforward rock or doom bands. And it really works with an act like Basic House whose whole stock in trade is dark atmosphere. On the second stage, ANTA's genre hopping style - always in the remit of cosmic jams, but staying tight - goes from thrashy chugging to free-flowing space prog, taking in bit of post-rock along the way. I'm a big fan of any band that can properly use a keyboard player, and ANTA deployed theirs perfectly. That's a thing pretty unique to this kind of band, as we'll see when we come to Alien Whale. If you need some quick shorthand for ANTA, they're a band whose bass player has more pedals than their guitarist.
I've never seen Matmos play live, so I don't know how much of their set is usually taken up by an animated talking head, but it wasn't for me. The music behind it sustained a lovely air of menace which really worked, but ultimately I found it really difficult to care. Opium Lord, on the other hand, present such an intimidating assault on the senses that even their soundcheck is menacing. They might be the best young doom band at the moment, and the fact that they seem like really nice guys only makes the ferocious racket they create sound all the better. If you're being artsy fartsy you'd call it abstract doom, and it's definitely informed (perhaps subconsciously, perhaps not - I don't know) by the avant-garde; they're definitely closer to Khanate than St. Vitus. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, their music suggests much more than it reveals, while also being entirely loud.
I'll tell you what else Capsule really nailed this year - timetabling. With a few exceptions, it was possible to see almost everything on both stages. If you wanted to venture into anything more playful and experimental (i.e. in the theatre) then you'll almost certainly miss a band or two, but if you went for the music only, they did a great job in scheduling. This allowed me to formulate an excellent double-bill of Opium Lord and Felix Kubin, polar opposites in musical style but jolly bedfellows in fuck-you attitude. Kubin is a mite less aggressive than Opium Lord, but his homemade avant-electro makes just as much of an impact. In his songs, proper songs with choruses and everything, he treads a fine line between earnesty and irony, knowing how insane the songs are but believing in them totally, challenging you to disregard them while inexorably drawing you in. He has great stage presence and as much as I love the hideous noise, it was nice to have a performer with a small amount of pop sensibility, influenced as much by the Pet Shop Boys as Suicide. I particularly enjoyed "Atomium Vertigo", and the accompanying dance routine.
Evil Blizzard, on the other hand, felt like a descent into something from a Gaspar Noé movie. I've never seen them live in the flesh, and what surprised me the most about their performance is how weirdly sexual it is. This might just be indicative of something hidden deep within my psyche, but something about the smaller second stage, all the masks, and all that bass (five bass players), was very engaging. They're like the live soundtrack to a fetish club, yet they sound surprisingly crisp, given all that low frequency playing. They're fun, pop-infused doom (closer to St Vitus on my trademarked St. Vitus/Khanate scale), and again they bring plenty of theatricality, with good tunes to back it up.
The total opposite, then, to Sleaford Mods. Andrew Fearn's sparse but high energy laptop beats provide a perfect backdrop to Jason Williamson's rants from the bus stop at the end of the world. It's everything: it's poetic, it's uncompromising, it's angry, and it's not going to take it anymore. They're so fresh and free of cliché that I feels a bit shit typing these words, as it doesn't really represent the experience of seeing them live at all. You'd be surprised how much performance two blokes with a laptop can give, but their occasional dancing and Jason's fidgety microphone technique filled the stage. They were undoubtedly the best act of the night, as they usually are, because they cut the shit and get straight to the point - an ever unfolding tirade against the banal, the superficial, the venal. In other words, they're quite good.
Saturday
I wish I'd seen more of Ex-Easter Island Heads, but only caught the end. There's was about ten of them, in a line on stage, and it sounded great. I did see all of Chris Brokaw. His slow alt-grunge sounds a bit like Dylan Carlson goes pop, with occasional bursts of fuzzy noise breaking through. They're invigorating moments amongst his extended scenes of heartbreak and loss, and a downbeat but effective start to Saturday. Also not afraid to pop up around the festival, which is nice - I think I saw him about fifty times around the place.
Across on the mainstage, Agathe Max's improvised noise violin set to bassy, industrial ambient required so many pedals and gizmos that she seemed to play most of the set perched on one leg. It's great to see a genuinely talented and trained musician abusing their talents in that way - it sounded amazing, and moments of very beautiful playing occasionally broke through a delicious wall of noise that didn't let up for her whole set.
Rattle, from Nottingham, who I erroneously described in my Supersonic preview as having three members, wove a very poppy sound considering they only consisted of two drummers. Their formula is intricate drum lines forming simple, poppy songs, usually based around a single phrase or motif. They're exciting to watch, very self-effacing, and danceable in a weirdly tribal way. Any dilution to their sound would probably ruin the live experience a little bit, unless it's a keenly deployed Moog. Every band could use more Moog.
Alien Whale, at the main stage, on the other hand, needed no help in that department as their power trio consists of guitar, drums, and keytar. First and last keytar of the festival, which was a shame, but their huge sound more than made up for that. They're a fun-loving cosmic jazz rock band who appear to be as inspired by Jimi Hendrix as they are by mushrooms. Mountainous guitarist Colin Langenus immediately starts to throw some high-intensity guitar moves, which inspires some breakouts of dancing here and there in the usually staid Supersonic crowd. Their booty-shaking jams are both epic and intricately layered, while their occasional (and surprisingly good) diversions into southern and blues rock are very welcome, but always filtered through their bass sound. They strike me as a band who could just keep chugging riff after riff until you asked them to stop, be it after ten minutes, three hours, or nine days.
Back on the second stage, Youth Man were setting up. I'd heard a bit about them in local press/blogs but I'd crucially never actually listened to them, figuring them to be a key part of the nascent B-Town movement that has recently taken up small column inches in NME and disregarding them as Not My Thing, so their presence at Supersonic was surprising. I'd gotten it all wrong about them - their muscular riffs and idiosyncratic sound tore the roof clean off a packed room. They seem enamored with the chaos they create, and singer/guitarist Kaila Whyte threw herself into every word and chord with the gusto of a stadium act. That they're so good so young is sickening really, and it's a rare case of the buzz surrounding them being completely justified. If I can be completely honest for a second, it was probably the only set of the festival when I didn't check my watch at some point. Awesome in the literal sense of the word.
My lack of watch checking meant I missed most of Sly and the Family Drone, which people have called the performance of the festival, mostly because Sly ended up in his pants in the middle of the crowded room. They played on the floor (as opposed to the stage) and the set up made for a more intimate surround than you'd usually get from that room, and while it sounded great, it was just too packed.
Sarah Kenchington's weird table bike of noises took centre stage in the theatre, which slowly packed out as she ran us through her creations and the surprisingly wonderful noises each instrument made. She's a charming host, unaffected and unpretentious, pricking any pomposity that the experimental music scene is imagined to have - she seemed amused by her own creations, and excited to show them off to a receptive audience. Her performance was at turns funny and rhythmic, and the music she managed to create from the strangest devices - at one point playing a tuba with a freshly inflated raft, pouring a kettleful of water into the barrel - and attempting at the end to play everything at once, we she actually managed to do. It really felt like she summed up everything Supersonic was actually about - pushing the limits of what music is and how we should think about it, as opposed to big name headliners whose fans arrive to see them and them alone, and clog up the central atrium in the process. Ahem.
Wolf Eyes played next, on the main stage. I'm a big fan of early Wolf Eyes - let's say everything (not everything, obviously, that's about eight hundred releases) up to Burned Mind, but I'd never seen them play live before. It really pains me to say this, but I loathed their performance. It was so ironic, so arch, so cynincal, self-regarding and indulgent that I found it really hard to stomach. It might have been because it came in such close proximity to the understated and self-effacing charm of Sarah Kenchington, but I found Wolf Eyes almost unbearable to watch, and not in a good way.
Imagine my relief when Swedish songstrel Jenny Hval appeared after they'd cleared off and, with her three piece band, outplayed, outsonged, outcharmed and outperformed them. She was another act who was pretty new to me, but I was really impressed by the craft she and the rest of the band clearly put into their sound, mixing in elements of pop with, if the newer songs are anything to go by, a much more uncompromising and unforgiving style.
Touring with Swans will do that to you, I suppose. By the time the guys themslves actually arrived, the crowd were just about ready to burst. Unfortunately, just as they started to rev up the muscle car that is Swans, some fuse blew and the entire stage went dark. Outstanding. It took a few minutes for things to get going again, in which time Michael Gira entertained us with some ad hoc shadow dancing, and once the lights were back on they dutifully started over, with nary a complaint. Not even the shit, paint and dust falling off the ceiling onto them put them off playing ferocious song after ferocious song, only stopping periodically between songs to brush themselves down. I felt sorry for the guy on steel guitar.
You don't need me to tell you about Swans, you and I both know that they're always great so, in the spirit of intrepid reporting, I went to see Khünnt. Khünnt had the difficult job of playing a set in the middle of Swans' two hour marathon performance, but they did draw a crowd and were just as intense as you'd hope from their recordings. I was actually familiar with Khünnt previous to the festival, as I'm a big fan of Geordie folk-hero Richard Dawson (who is loosely and mysteriously affiliated with them) and in my previous life as a writer for another site I had the pleasure of reviewing them. I absolutely love them, they're another young, no-fucks-to-give doom band of the most miserably crushing variety. They have a great frontman, and all the band gave a hell of a performance to a room that was criminally underpopulated. Their drummer gamely wore a Swans tee, and admonishing the audience on Twitter afterwards for seeing them instead of Swans was a nice touch.
So yeah, it was a great weekend. Big thanks to Capsule, and Lauren of Rarely Unable for sorting out the tickets.
