Supernormal 2017 Pt 3

Sunday starts quietly, as Sundays should.  Hapsburg Braganza is a solo electric guitar act, elegant, misty and minimal - think Papa M meets Roger Eno – and Pon Pon proffer softly malleted drums, subtle electronics, guitar and breathy vocals, as if someone had detuned a shy ghost.  It’s pleasant, but perhaps too reticent, and may have fared better on one of the more intimate stages.  Sharron Kraus’ extended treatments of dark, dark hearted folk songs are also understated, but immediately captivating, proving once again that trad songwriting goes to eldritch places metal would never dare.  Some soft, loamy recorder playing offers tiny fragments of light. 

We called Bruxa Maria pummelling?  Well, some parts of Cattle’s performance are like sandpaper rubbed against the face by an angry Judoon, but unlike so many rock cudgellers, they know when the barrage must end, and space be found to give the songs shape.  So, there is room for some electronics-benighted death sax, a chilling a cappella section for the howling vocalist, who appears to have been possessed by a constipated demon, and surprisingly funky business from the dual drummers (ESG cowbell patterns are this year’s vocal delay unit, popping up in multiple acts).  Made perfect by a summer school session of Crowdsurfing For The Under Eights.

Mary Ocher is notable for two reasons.  One, she and her band are clad in what appear to be Earth, Wind & Fire stage outfits modelled from spaghetti, two her quirky, chirpily bouncy music is so varied, moving from a quiet synth opener to dessicated funk via unhingedly jolly library music not a million miles away from Syd Dale, and some raven-stalking that’s come straight from “Venus In Furs”.  All this with a delicately stentorian voice that makes us think of an anti-matter Nana Mouskouri.  Jesus, we’ve not thought of Nana Mouskouri in thirty years, Supernormal does strange things to the mind.

Olivia Norris presents a short dance/mime piece, in which she contorts herself awkwardly across the barn in an unnerving white mask, before erupting into an unexpected drag club mime to barely remembered Britsoul pipsqueak Roachford – it’s like 80s child nightmare fodder Noseybonk scripted by a horny Beckett.  Not all the extra-musical elements are worth the effort, though.  The Dream Machine turns out to be an old van that we’re invited to paint, which works out as ugly and pointless as you’d expect, whilst Happy Birthday Pig Face Christus is merely 4 people chanting the menu items from the catering vans in a pseudo-religious style and giggling smugly, and we should have woken them from their complacency with a chipotle enema.

A tribute band isn’t the usual Supernormal fare, but when it consists of songs from Pink Floyd’s The Wall lovingly eviscerated in a style that recalls V/Vm, The Residents and Ween, it begins to make more sense.  The Stallion have horrifically pitch-shifted vocals, and the ugliest projections it is possible to make with a cracked copy of Doom and a Roger Waters mask.  The slogan “you’re fucking with The Stallion” regularly flashes in queasy fluorescent text; we rather feel the opposite...

*Zoviet:France* beam in fizzing, hissing tones, like messages from a distant nebula, where it’s always 1997.  Sonically dated this may be, but it is utterly beguiling, and the shifting tones float like clouds scudding behind waving trees as night falls whilst you lie on your back in a field (and we’d know).

MXLX starts his cheaply insistent industrial set as John Carpenter playing Godflesh, and ends it as Alec Empire weeping incoherently outside his ex’s wedding reception, before being carried from the tent by a small throng of listeners.  That’s the Supernormal experience all over, moving from the absurd to the dramatic, before ending in budget valediction.  You should definitely get a ticket next year.  Don’t hang about though, there is a big community of people already planning their 2018 visit. Not least two Nightshift writers and a nice man from the midlands.

Supernormal 2017 Pt 2

Little note: I didn't see the gardening opera, sadly, and that part is from the description by Colin May, another Nutshaft writer and absolute expert on all things world, folk and avant-classical.

Just as a vindictive rain storm is followed in minutes by glorious cerulean sky, Supernormal can leap from the strangest sounds imaginable to straightforward rock.  Wargs play honeyed indie in the style of Throwing Muses at their sleepiest with some soothing pedal steel, whilst Aggressive Prefector are a no messin’ meld of Motorhead and vintage thrash, with songs introduced in a voice that sounds like an aged Tony the Tiger in rehab after the Frosties money has run out.  College rockers St Deluxe disappoint, though, sounding like Harmacy era Sebadoh without the geeky charm.  As s if there the festival’s nanotech is trying to fix the wound of normality they cause, we walk away to find one of the trees has sprouted crash cymbals like fungus, which children are happily bashing.

Back in the house Liz Muir & Caitlin Alais Callahan are trading sparse tension cues on cello and double bass, and it’s like the Jaws theme slowly decomposing in an abandoned potting shed.   They also recite a Goethe poem over long vertiginous lines, which drifts into a pure, delightful performance of a Scottish folk tune: in 20 minutes, the set’s a microcosm of Supernormal’s rich variety.

At most festivals, soundbleed between stages is infuriating.  Once Supernormal has recalibrated you, it can be exciting.  Whilst contrabassoon/low brass trio Ore are sharing hushed, funereal tones beneath a gnarled tree, the sounds of children playing on the nearly tyre swings, and snatches of Evil Usses rattling away on the Shed stage make it seem all the more eerie.  They conclude with what is essentially a monstrous doom riff played on a tuba. This is, of course, awesome; though if you hadn’t guessed, you probably shouldn’t have read this far, anyway.

Even by Supernormal standards the tiny BEEF Octopolis space is a hidden obscurity.  Over the weekend we witness Graham Dunning DJing field recordings (surprisingly fascinating), Bruce McClure & Wojtek Rusin’s opera based on readings from a gardening magazine (surprisingly sinister, especially the terrifying phrase “Next, pesticides”), and Fouli’s Daughter, a potted history of the foghorn continually interrupted by its own subject (surprisingly a highlight of the weeke-PAAARAAPP!!).

Supernormal may be a cavalcade of surprises to which one should not bring expectations, but we’d be disappointed if the bill didn’t include at least one ruthless hardcore pummelling.  Bruxa Maria’s slamming intensity clears a path through our consciousness like a Vogon constructor fleet, but can still turn on a sixpence at screaming harpy Gill Dread’s hand signal.  Just exhilarating.

The Vortex might provide sensory overload, but also hosts one of the calmest, most thoughtful pieces of the festival, The Dead Rat Orchestra’s Tyburnia project, weaving folk songs from the area around what was once London’s execution hub into a single, 80 minute tapestry, whilst a trio of crackly films are projected.  Anti-capitalism rubs shoulders with William Blake, and the South Sea Bubble bursts in the nightmarishly melting face of Tony Blair.  We intended to give this show ten minutes; we ended up emerging blinking 80 minutes later to find that dusk had fallen and that we’d bought a CD and book set.  The evening ends with Jaxon Payne’s lithe V-drum solo, nodding towards Art Of Noise and Kraftwerk, and Kuro’s windswept drones and eldritch folk vistas, a paranoid British take on fractured jazz we call Twin Peak District.

An Event That's Above The Standard

A lot of this appears in the new Nutshaft, with extra words form my good friend Sam Shepherd.  There is a little bonus material here, but for mreasons of space - also, there were a good few strong acts I saw and didn;t write up in the first place, such is the wealth of joy to be found at Supernormal.  I urge everyone reading this to go next year (unless it means I can't get a ticket).

SUPERNORMAL, Braziers Park, Ipsden, 4-6/8/17

Four years ago we helped a man looking for a bus stop in Oxford.  He’d come from the midlands to attend his first Supernormal, so we were in fact able to accompany him right to the festival gate.  Within one hour of arriving at this year’s event, he barrels over and shakes our hand vigorously, just like the last two years.  This tells you three things about Supernormal: it’s very small and intimate; it is more friendly than a Quaker meeting house made from MDMA; most people who attend once are instant converts, returning every year.  Matana Roberts, in her excellent solo sax concert (part Coltrane spirit quest, part New Orleans gutbucket grit, with sententious spoken interjections a la Laurie Anderson) celebrates the event, noting the open-minded nature and the pleasing lack of security: “You’ve embraced the freedom but are recognising the boundaries”.  Aside from a rumour that some toilets are closed because someone had made a s(h)ite specific artwork having confused Pat McGeown with Cy Twombly, it appears that she was right, those people who believe anything goes are also those most likely to be considerate of their effect on others.  And, as usual, the effect of Supernormal on us was joyous, disorienting and inspiring.

Not Sorry admittedly ease us in gently, sounding like lackadaisical PG Tips chimps tired after a hard day moving wardrobes, playing half-speed Talking Heads lit-funk.  Lush Worker soon ups the ante, with a landslide of guitar skree and gravel.  Like the famous image of the duck/rabbit this is simultaneously blissfully soothing and aggressively coruscating, depending on how you squint your ears.

Just as the red kites swirling above the field were introduced to the area having nearly become extinct, Supernormal has managed to locate the last bleeding pair of infamous COUM Transmissions performers to perform some pieces for the first time in 40 years.  COUM Flakes’ first number consists of someone resembling Transformers era Orson Welles doing a Tom Waits song, with the flatbed trucks and strippers replaced by Nazi war criminals.  Despite obtuse lyrics about torturing prisoners or advert voiceovers having a barney, the music is pleasingly approachable, Gene Krupa tom tattoos underpinning warm chords that recall early Pink Floyd (more of them later).

Next in the Cthulhu cathedral structure called The Vortex, home of the multimedia immersion, Rapid Eye Electronics Ltd present a twisted government information film in which Black Dog electronica spooks itself in a hall of mirrors whilst convoluted regulations for duels are presented over images of vintage dancers.  It’s like a paranormal Public Service Broadcasting featuring Elizabeth Price (and with better beats).

C Joynes turns out not to be an operetta about Ernie Wise’s hairpiece – keep up at the back – but a fantastic solo guitarist, tangling English folk tunes into Fahey skeins and snaggles.  An arrangement of the “Whittlesea Straw Bear Tune”reminds us of walking folk guitar encyclopaedia Duck Baker’s trad revisions, whilst a snippy plucking technique has whiffs of stylists as varied as Davy Graham and James Blood Ulmer.  A bird flies into the medieval barn in which we’re sitting, duetting with an intriguing arrangement of “Someone To Watch Over Me”, as if to flip the Venerable Bede’s analogy: life is short, but you can make some pretty amazing things whilst it happens.

There’s often a patronising, belittling air when African music is described as raw – the noble savage myth doesn’t become any more palatable with added tape hiss – but sometimes raw is the only word that will serve, and Ghana’s King Ayisoba’s set is as infectiously bludgeoning as the heaviest hardcore band to grace the Shed stage . On record Ayisoba dips into hip hop and highlife, but here we just have mantric chanting, hammering riffs from the two string kologo, relentless percussion and some sort of transverse didgeridoo we can’t identify that sounds like God blowing his nose.  Unstoppable.

Eric Chenaux’s set opens with some abstract wah wah guitar, like the soundtrack to a Futurist porn film (“I’ve come to fix your washing machine and/or insane death device”), and it’s fascinating, but his voice floors us, a truly stunning, sweet soul croon made for serenading the dawn.  With the seasick guitar underneath, it’s like listening to Marvin Gaye record the little known LP No, Seriously, What The Actual Fuck Is Going On??

Surprsingly, Wolf Eyes leave the sonic excoriation behind, in favour of thoughtful vistas.  Even so, it’s hard to work out where the sounds are coming from, with a sax that sounds like a synth, and crunchy guitar tones embracing the Lou Reed style blasted poetry.  The set is still shocking, though, because of the flagrant double denim.   

Tirikilatops’ colour saturated Timmy Mallett mania is a little too much for the start of Sunday, so we locate a comfy set in the refined environs of Braziers House for Steve Beresford & Colin Webster.  Beresford is using the house piano, but spends most of his time plucking the innards, or playing with a portable Toys R Us of devices, although a few bars of random tango surprise us; Webster starts with rusty gate sax, before apparently exploring every tone - and detachable part - of his saxophone.