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.
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