Ahora es el momento, no hay futuro!. Now is the time, there is no future!
Ahem. So, bearing this in mind, I had good intentions of getting this done quickly, split the days and everything, but I didn’t get around to writing most of it beforehand (not that anyone would ever do such a thing, perish the thought) and the festival is something of a system overload. Physically exhausting, emotionally and intellectually over stimulating. . . I mean, obviously this is part of what makes it so great and so nourishing, but such an abundance of cultural riches takes time to fully digest. What I lack in swift turnaround I’ll make up in grindingly thorough nit-picking. Or something. Probably not that.
Friday includes the sitting room of a haunted cottage, the incantations of Welsh witches, fluoro-badgers in hoodies roaming the streets, noise-rock anime super heroes, and samosas for starters. Despite this profusion of greatness, whenever you run into people and ask each other what you’ve most enjoyed, tired and thrumming brains wheel through the previous hours and days only to come up. . . “system error: still processing”.
One name that bubbles up in these moments is Barcelona’s Dame Area, a band I came to with little expectation. In this sense they are a perfect Supersonic act, arriving as a bit of an unknown quantity, delivering a committed, energetic, show that rocks everyone back on their heels, and leaving a room full of new fans. A dynamic mix of pulsing euro-electro and machine primitive-industrial their urgent sense of motion is regularly galvanized by the pair of them beating hell out of drums and metallic percussion. You could argue the elements here are all forty years old but their combination is undeniably explosive.
Dame Area. Photo: Robert Barrett
Sporting massive mutton chops and a jacket which just has to be too hot, Victor L Crux bends over a table-top mountain of gear as live-wire vocalist Silvia Konstance circles him in constant motion. Thin as a cigarette, a nouvelle vague beatnik in a Throbbing Gristle shirt radiating energy instead of ennui. She twirls and roars as if she and the music are one. Up on the rail, out in the crowd, it’s a fearless, captivating performance. Her vocals range from guttural to high, almost sweet, from rage to exhortation. They come mostly (but not exclusively) in Italian and Spanish landing with a directness that vaults the language barrier as easily as she does the one front of stage.
This linguistic intermingling echoes the blend of musical styles. The glowing logo behind them features the electrical symbol for Earth encircled by the phrase “Ahora es el momento, no hay futuro” (Now is the time, there is no future) redirecting punk nihilism into a call to action. When they play ‘La Nueva Era’, the song from which it comes, it arrives as a forceful chanted imperative, a rallying cry. In the immediate now, their new album, Toda la Verdad Sobre Dame Area (The Whole Truth about Dame Area) is out in a matter of days and promises to capture the raw energy of their live show in a way they have not previously managed.
Those among you paying particularly close attention will know Silvia featured on a track from Birds Catching Fire In the Sky, UKAEA‘s most recent album. I don’t think they reprise it together here but I could be mistaken. As festivals go Supersonic is scheduled to minimise performance clashes but the start or end of sets often fall victim to the eternal dance between venues. UKAEA suffer both as they’ve started when I arrive and I don’t want to miss the beginning of Melt-Banana (spoiler: I still did). In the world of moody industrial experimentalism, taking that Throbbing Gristle t-shirt as a starting point, Dame Area probably owe more to Chris and Cosey while UKAEA are somewhere along the ever evolving Coil continuum.
A couple of months back I saw them as a trio mostly playing the Birds Catching Fire. . . stuff, but with this being a special gig there’s an expanded line-up and new material, some excellent visuals featuring badgers in hoodies, and a general air of chaos and imminence. Regular vocalist Deyar Yasin sings for a bit then leaves the stage, who else is up there and what they are doing is largely unclear. Not that it matters, UKAEA is a nebulous and ever changing idea. Exploratory futurist music with concerns beyond novelty or function. There’s not enough gabba: possibly some of the newer material is not fully realised but you can’t fault the ambition. Bigger, bolder, badger!
Gazelle Twin. Photo Robert Barrett
Down the hill and into the grand hall. On the far side of the territory yet unmistakably connected by threads deep below ground, Gazelle Twin presents Black Dog in the hushed and ornate setting of The Institute. Where other performances are about creating a direct, or even physical, engagement with the audience, this is a paranormal vision. Elizabeth Bernholz is distant, almost as if she’s behind glass. In keeping with the theme of haunting she becomes a shape-shifting apparition, an unquiet spirit trapped between two worlds. The show begins with droning synths and a faded flickering image, a shot we take to be the haunted farmhouse of her childhood. Is it really the actual house? Is the story even true? How could you know? Does it even matter? Do you believe in ghosts?
As is often said of ghosts, Bernholz seems caught in patterns, turned inwards, stuck in a loop. She spends a lot of time in an armchair lit by a standard lamp, staging which suggests the cosily domestic but is made strange and cold by being out of place. The whole thing is endearingly weird. The intro film had given a folk-horror Bagpuss vibe but later the performance begins to remind me of the Club Silencio scene in Mulholland Drive. “No hay banda!” There is no band! Everything is on tape.
Gazelle Twin. Photo: George Miller
Sat at a table with a reel to reel machine she plays back the samples used in ‘The Long Room’ stretching them out into a longer version, into a song. It’s a genuinely mesmerising moment. What I guess we should call the “sound design” is remarkable. The music sounds stranger, the haunted synths are unearthly, the beats are of unclear origin, and there’s huge juddering bass that becomes a presence in the hall. She ends on the two strongest tunes of the show, a still and sorrowful version of ‘A Door Opens’ followed by a rough and combative ‘Unstoppable Force’, then is gone, back through the wall.
Gazelle Twin. Photo: Cat Dineley
The weekend before the festival, I was in Wales, enjoying Tristwch Y Fenywod’s debut album and pondering the mystic quality of the language. I thought about the country’s rich brew of myth and legend, its rugged coastline, its mountains and dark forests, the abundance of ruined castles, that the national flag has an actual dragon on it, and I wondered, where are all the Welsh language black metal bands? Seriously, it’s an absolute gift. Anyway, the self titled Tristwch Y Fenywod is a really good album – a fine channelling of atmospheric 80s goth moves into their own occult, feminist enigma. Its dark magic is in part the result of the three wyrd sisters taking on unfamiliar and self-created instruments. Any band with a rhythm section still learning their way is on a slightly wobbly footing: on stage this can leave them feeling a bit shambolic or under rehearsed. Their vision currently outrunning their ability, the live set feels like a work in progress, an incantation short of fully bewitching.
Tristwch Y Fenywod. Photo: John Convery
The None have almost the opposite issue, tight and sharp on the attack you sense the best songs on their debut LP are ones they haven’t written yet. A great rhythm section with interesting ideas that keep it away from formula, a wonderfully noisy guitarist, and a great vocalist. The only four-square rock band on today, they play muscular, shouty, noise rock that does not mess around and yet oddly seems quite wholesome. Maybe that’s just me. ‘Railing’, off their one and only EP, is a stand out but I have faith they can, and will, get better still.
The None. Photo: Robert Barrett
Melt-Banana for scale, were fierce and completely fantastic. If, in our heads and hearts, they’re teen anime superheroes, distortion and velocity their weapons in the endless war with the cosmic horrors, the reality is only marginally less thrilling. Thirty-plus years into their career, I can reveal they display some signs of a little aging, if less than us regular humans. Their performance however does not show it; the intensity is undimmed, the pace is relentless, and the band’s good humour contagious. Tunes from new album 3+5 blend seamlessly with decade-old ones from Fetch and a sprinkling of older material. They are never less than full force, and while their sound is abrasive it is totally undeniably joyful. To my left there’s a mosh pit of excited types deluded they can move as fast as the music; they are having a great time, as are the band, as are we all. Music is medicine.
Melt-Banana. Photos: George Miller
