Supersonic Festival review: Weekend of experimental music is still accessible

For more than 10 years now, Birmingham’s Supersonic festival has been a central heartbeat for underground and experimental music in the UK. “For curious audiences” is the festival’s tagline and this rings true throughout its eclectic and challenging programming across the weekend.

The opening night’s performance is no exception and takes place in the city’s town hall, where Swedish songwriter Anna von Hausswolff sits down to play the gigantic church organ that dates back to 1834.

The sounds that come from the organ create a dense, booming drone that swells in the room as Hausswolff’s vocals soar above it. Her voice is one that can reach astonishing heights and when she lets it all out, alongside the full accompaniment of her band, the force of the sound is both explosive and enthralling, creating a truly unrepeatable opening performance.

Charles Hayward from This Heat plays a solo drum set that is glued together with unpredictable rhythms and constant tempo shifts, filled out by pedals and backing tracks, creating what feels like snippets and vignettes rather than complete songs. Nicholas Bullen, formerly of Napalm Death, plays a set of pulverising industrial noise that is so pummeling in its intensity and volume that his own screams cannot be heard over it.

Sheffield’s Blood Sport play a special collaborative set with Heavy Lifting, the latter writes live code to create spontaneous music on the spot. Wrapping themselves around the electronic beats and rhythms that the code creates, the three-piece play live drums, bass, synthesisers and employ a heavy distorted vocal effect that mirrors the sounds of a drowning robot. This all comes together to form a deeply rhythmic groove which they lock into to play one, long non-stop performance, weaving in and out of crisp dark techno into more abstract areas.

Wrestling constantly between harmonious and antagonistic sounds, it melds to create a powerful, hypnotic and exhilarating piece of dance music.

Melt-Banana excel in lightening-speed Japanese noise rock of a potency few can match, and Charles Hayward returns to the stage once more to collaborate with Manchester’s Gnod, as Anonymous Bah. A heady mix of deep, booming saxophone often leads the groove, as the treated vocals of Louise Woodcock ring out to form a dance-inducing concoction that feels expansive in its ongoing evolutions as the set builds, bubbles and grows throughout.

During the daytime the local area of Digbeth feels lively, in the neighbouring Custard Factory (where the festival used to be held) the sounds of Fela Kuti play loudly from a PA as street food cooks, kids do workshops in the sun and people wonder around a craft market or sit for a drink.

The festival itself has a particularly relaxed feel and across the three primary venues in which it is held, no security is stopping people taking drinks in or outside, so you get a very natural flow of people with some hanging out on the streets drinking beer, escaping the intense heat of the warehouse venues.

Ex-Easter Island Head open the second day and the usual three-piece have expanded to perform as a large ensemble, with 20 people on stage. All of who are playing their trademark setup of horizontally laid guitars on top of a table, which are gently rubbed, plucked, drummed and whacked to create a symphony of humming reverberations.

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The beauty of this performance lies within the power of its restraint, as the group avoid the easy trappings of ramping up the volume and tempo to match with the on-stage numbers, instead they build quietly and gently, showing remarkable poise and grace as the set grows into a thundering climax.

Richard Dawson brings his band to perform tracks from his formidable new album, Peasant, and delivers a set that manages to feel both starkly intimate and gloriously euphoric. His voice screeches and bellows in a discordant harmony with his stabby and sharp guitar playing; the rough edges of which are welcomed into the set and celebrated to create a wholly unique form of folk music that never feels anything other than futuristic. Come the end of “The Vile Stuff”, the elongated outro almost recalls the Velvet Underground as the violin drones whirr in and out of the squawking guitars, growing a quiet thunderstorm to end with.

Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs play a blistering set of intense sludge rock as sweat drips from the steel beams of the warehouse. They play before saxophonist Colin Stetson performs an endlessly absorbing set as his circular breathing technique lends itself to creating a feeling of being locked in an endless loop. His new Aphex Twin-influenced material adds a further sense of the locked groove to his performance.

On the final day Lone Taxidermist takes top prize for strangeness (and this is on a day when a band called Gorillabot play, whose members include a robot and a gorilla having an identity crisis) as the venue looks like it’s prepared for a murder clean-up, with rolls of plastic sheets filling the room.

This is as much performance art as it is music, as projections show food-fetish slides whilst dressed-up women prowl through the audience, squirting cream on people and generally causing chaos. Musically there are throbs of industrial noise that occasionally break to almost allow a smidge of pop sensibility to creep through as vocals are live recorded and played back to create harsh loops of screams. The performance ends with the audience being wrapped in sheeting while Natalie Sharp climbs a giant ladder and clambers on top of them in crowd-surfing fashion, adding a riotous ending to a brilliantly bizarre performance.

Snapped Ankles’ aesthetic resembles that of some woodland creators or a lost forest tribe but sonically they present a turbocharged take on electronic-tinged psychedelia that is a surging, captivating charge from beginning to end.

The Space Lady plays an incredibly earnest but well-loved set, playing cosmic keyboard versions of classics from The Beatles to The Seeds, alongside her own 1960s-inspired hippy material. Oxbow closes the festival, playing with a 12-person choir. Many of whom look mildly terrified as singer Eugene Robinson paces the stage back and forth with his ears stuck back with black masking tape, slowly peeling off one layer of clothing at a time. The band move from bursts of crushing noise rock to more refined, melodic and stripped-back songs. Frequently shifting between a whisper and a growl and the might of the choir accentuates such parts.

Whilst Supersonic deals superbly in experimental music, it also doesn’t take itself too seriously and alongside the mind-altering music, record fairs and pop-up stalls, activities such as black-metal life drawing or Black Sabbath karaoke are offered, as well as events and gigs for children.

This thoughtfulness leads it to be a deeply experimental weekend but also a genuinely accessible one too. During a period in which many line-ups of alternative festivals are becoming increasingly uniform, Supersonic brightly stands out as a true alternative to the alternative.