“If you don’t wanna folk me, baby. . .”
Among the many reasons to love Supersonic, up near the top of the list is the programming. Sunday brings an unprecedented line-up of artists making striking new music that is openly engaged with traditional forms or in some way folk adjacent. It’s a packed day of acoustic ambient loveliness and songs about death and ghosts. The heaviness coming as emotional weight rather than in the odd blasts of discordance or distortion.
Daisy Rickman is a cosmic folker from Mousehole in Cornwall, who even sings in Kernowek some of the time. The music rolls and flows organically, it’s so loose that at some point it’s just abstract atmosphere created by the band shaking, hitting and stroking their instruments rather than actually playing them. The lovely ‘Signpost to the Stars’ is a more singer-songwritery moment, her voice more Nico than Joni. Unhurried and sad, she performs it alone, then gets behind the kit to bang out a ragged krautrocker with her band.
Daisy Rickman. Photo: Robert Barrett
Likely the most massive instrument anyone is wrangling onstage this weekend, Mary Lattimore‘s harp makes the most delicate sound. Her set interleaves her gorgeous music with stories of the songs’ inspiration, each revealing her to be as sweet and good natured as you might hope. It’s properly spellbinding as, in similar vein, are Brìghde Chaimbeul‘s tunes on the Scottish small pipes. The pipes seem something of an erratic contraption, sat in her lap in perpetual need of adjustment but from them she produces mournful drones threaded with beautiful melodies. It’s hypnotic and the response in the hall is enthusiastic. Behind her a slow-motion film of a Scottish dancer, alone in nature, elegantly moves from obvious to perfect accompaniment. She ends with ‘Bonn Beinn Eadarra – The Haunting’, a song she says she got from a headless ghost, and it’s amazing – absolutely beautiful.
Mary Lattimore. Photo: John Convery
Brighde Chaimbeul. Photo: Robert Barrett
“I love getting people to sing together. It changes the world.” Matana Roberts takes us to church, and has us singing spirituals as she slips between song and story in a gentle voice. It is hard to overstate how skilfully she achieves this. As the saying goes she has the crowd in the palm of her hand, but we are less in her grasp than we are together, a sense of calm and unity filling the room. We maintain a background hum and become her choir as she pulls strands and fragments from her Coin Coin records, telling tales and just occasionally blasting some sax. Dropping out last year due to Covid, she thanks the festival for never making her feel bad and inviting her back; she says she loves coming here to Birmingham, she can feel the history and the hope of it. This is news to many in the crowd, even those of us who love the city.
Matana Roberts. Photo: Jim Brindley
Digbeth’s streets once bleak and empty are now a riot of themed bars and colourful graffiti, the best of it interrupted by the cack-handed and well meaning – the antiseptic aftertaste of corporate approval. There are still crows eating sick from between the broken glass but it is increasingly an intensely managed area. Yesterday the match was on, the bars swarmed with activity, all was hectic and buzzing. Now it is oddly quiet. I appear to be the only one heading down from XOYO to catch yer man, John folky feller. To a degree, the festival crowd seem to have picked a venue or be moving back ‘n’ forth more stealthily.
The balcony seating in The Institute is a hit, permanently occupied by this point in the weekend, but downstairs is comfortable. The security here have come to like us because the Supersonic crowd are good natured; there’s never any trouble. As I slip in to catch John Francis Flynn I’m warned of the potentially soporific atmosphere. He plays some penny whistle, sings a wonderful version of ‘Kitty’ and talks about the song’s history. As the set wears on there’s extraordinary bursts of noise from the upright bass and thundering percussion to match the earlier hush.
John Francis Flynn. Photo: Robert Barrett
Nobody was looking to ØXN for a set of non-stop party bangers, but they start with ‘O death’ and work downwards from there, playing through last year’s debut Cyrm. Misery and drone. At times they reach Earth levels of slow. The huge success of Lankum has led to the idea that this is Radie Peat’s band when really it’s her and Katie Kim’s harmonies at the heart of it. Begun during the lockdown as an excuse for them to sing sad, dark folk songs together, that the band was born of tragedy and a plague upon the land is entirely suited its mood and material. They cast a reverent pall across proceedings. (If you’re unfamiliar with Kim’s solo work try 2022’s Hour Of The Ox, which coincidentally features all of ØXN in some way or other).
Katie Kim (ØXN). Photo: Cat Dineley
Radie’s Lankum bandmate Ian Lynch is on the other stage with his own drone folk project One Leg One Eye. I’m finding it harder to get involved with it although I like the album. It’s a touch static performance-wise: two men staring at tables, enlivened when Ian sings. I start to wonder what happens if he loses his hat – does he have a whole bag of them?
Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy is wearing bold dungarees that verge on the comedic, and mostly singing the sweet, soft, songs from Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You. It’s a low-key, laid-back set, his voice and gentle accompaniment, from Thomas Deacon and John Ashton, generating an atmosphere of its own. As much poetry as music the songs inhabit a space both unique to him and universal – good-hearted and comforting. This feeling flows into the new songs ‘That’s How We Make It Our Home’ and another beautiful one I think is called ‘Water’s Fine’ which, he says, are from a forthcoming album A Purple Bird that we’ll see on the other side of the US election. Unlike that grim spectacle, his performance allows you some measure of restored faith in humanity.
Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. Photo: Robert Barrett
In a final flourish of the weekend’s smart programming, Mohammad Syfkan, an act who might have simply come and gone in a mid=afternoon slot, is absolutely killing it in XOYO. Dapper and smiling, he sits on stage playing his joyful Bouzouki party jams. Balloons rain from the balcony, outlandish dance moves break out all over. It’s the most banging, upbeat thing all day, and a perfect celebratory close to a wonderful festival.
Mohammad Syfkan. Photo: Jim Brindley
