Supernormal 2022 Part 3

 There are inevitably a handful of things that don’t quite land. Reciprocate’s plaintive US alt-rock style doesn’t excite, coming off like a wheedling petulant Pavement, and - it pains us to say - Nightshift, whose buzzy mantric tunes have potential, but whose performance seems tentative. Oh, and we’re also invited to climb over a stile, go into the wood, and look at a blue polystyrene cow (and then to go straight back, because there’s really not much to do once you get there). But to balance this there’s always something inexplicable and intriguing, like LDSN/Yakki Da!, who play melodica and make wonky loops from fragments of a story about going on holiday we can never quite decode, like a child’s summer holiday project being sucked into a black hole, or The Tuna Raffle (not a band or an artwork, but a raffle for a shitload of canned tuna; no, us neither). 

The final live set of the weekend is Birmingham electronica legend Surgeon, whose relentless clanging techno set is a joy, and also a masterclass in how to make something endlessly fascinating from minimal means. In a way, this is a great metaphor for the whole festival, which is a Sellotape and sawdust affair run on hope and good will rather than wodges of cash or corporate sponsorship partners, but which manages to surprise and delight with every iteration, constantly feeling new by never losing its core identity. Asking whether Supernormal is a good festival is like asking whether manna is good fast food, it’s so far ahead of the competition in Oxfordshire (and probably the universe) that the question is utterly meaningless. So here’s our final judgment: smashing.

SIDEBAR

“Mum, can we go see Taskmaster?”

“No need, we have Taskmaster at home.”

Molly is “Taskmaster at home”, running around the miniscule Colour Out Of Space stage, florid and flustered, attempting to achieve 30 one-minute tasks with no particular resources, before a klaxon announces that she’s (almost certainly) failed. It’s stupidly entertaining, and typical of a strain of clowning that runs through this year’s festival. An act like Secluded Bronte, including films criticising the cameras they’ve been shot with, is witty, but Taylor & Luck are flat-out hilarious, dreaming up a preposterous Abingdon ghost story with accompaniment that is half free improv, half Foley. There’s a lofi comic absurdity to so many of this weekend’s sets they could have been taken to Ipsden or Edinburgh with equal justification, from the brilliantly named Run The Bath, which is essentially “Emo Philips plays Ivor Cutler on V/Vm Test Records”, to Fluxus plumbers Usurper, the Mario/Chuckle Brothers mash-up we never knew we needed. The absolute monarchs, though, are The Slipshod Ramblers, a duo in what might be homemade albino Womble outfits playing bleak, Beckettian folk songs, and getting them exactly wrong: “Death, she knocks for us all” they intone, but probably only because we died laughing. 

Supernormal 2022 Part 2

Actually, the sidebar is in the next post (stupid tag limit).

Or perhaps there is no brand. The festival as a whole is more about being open-minded and open-eared than any specific group of styles and genres, meaning that not every act is challenging.  Société Étrange use bass, drums and electronics to create dubby burbling which is like To Rococo Rot with the krautrock froideur replaced by a cheery warmth: this is friendly music that would invite you in for tea and ensure you had the last piece of cake (Kick out the jam sponges! Release the battenburgs!). Also liable to become your sonic best friends are Dean Rodney Jr & The Cowboys, whose summery grooves and golden stetson could enliven any shindig, whilst Shovel Dance Collective are a brilliant British folk outfit who could inspire jigs and singalongs in any village hall, whilst reminding us just how many of our nation’s traditional songs are about celebrating the downtrodden and oppressed. Possibly most enjoyable of all are Dischi, an urban pop duo from Manchester who bring unbounded fun to their light bouncy backing tracks in a  style that might recall Althea & Donna, Daphne & Celeste, and Fun Boy Three all at once. But if that sounds too mainstream, the little Queef Qult stage reliably delivers a diet of queer cabaret and DJs playing absolute certified bangers all weekend, or you can make some masks with a proxy Lord Summerisle ready for a midnight screening of The Wicker Man. 

Perhaps as a result of the non-hierarchical nature of Supernormal, where performers become audience members, and punters become collaborators, the crowds seem to naturally intuit the right response to any set. So, Thomas Stone’s refined contrabassoon pieces are met by a quiet contemplative audience (excluding a dragonfly who is buzzing madly against the Barn’s window, and that somehow merges wonderfully with the automated rattling snare sounds); people laugh at Feghoot’s preposterous performance (one person tries to play keyboard, the other tries to fuck it up, genius simplicity); they dance to the wry literate indie funk of Comfort which merges Sultans of Ping FC with LCD Soundsystem; and go batshit bonkers to the industrial techno of Samuel Kerridge. Then they do all of these at once for Pink Siifu & The NEGRO ALIVE’! Experience (sic), because they’re a Jameson-guzzling collision between Funkadelic, Public Enemy, and Rage Against The Machine, with a little Snoop Dogg snakiness to the vocals to keep big grins present, on- and offstage.

Hot Crocks

Here's the review of the reliably amazing Supernormal.  If you read the version in the latest Nightshift, this is the director's cut, featuring an extra section at the end about some of the less musical elements, which I proposed as a sidebar, but which the editor just barred.  Not moaning, by the way, it's a challenge to get the mag all jigsawed together in time for printing deadlines.

Because of the tags limit, the putative sidebar is in the next post.

SUPERNORMAL, Braziers Park, 12-4/8/22

Because Supernormal is a cross between a village fete and a revolutionary happening, they have an old-fashioned crockery smashing stall – the only differences being that it’s miked and amplified at a ridiculous volume, and that the plates are daubed with negative concepts that we can symbolically destroy (“Tories”; “patriarchy”; err, “plates”). The very first one to be obliterated on Friday reads “judgment”, as if to make this review redundant from the outset. But in a way criticising Supernormal is pointless, because the line between viewer and performer is blurred at best: only half the people here are paying customers, and someone you’ll be chatting to might turn out to be the next act half an hour later. In a telling moment, somebody leaping onstage to boogie to Aya’s abstract dance set gets a cheer as big as the musician, and at what other festival can you create a graphic score and have it interpreted by a pianist? And the other reason criticising Supernormal is pointless is that nearly everything is excellent, whether it’s a gloriously varied three days of music, a horsebox filled with mystifying charity shop artworks, the bar prices, or the lovely stewards cooling sweltering crowds with plant misters.

It might have been three years since the last Supernormal, but the organisers’ desire for intensity has not waned, and any visitor must expect to have their ears - and possibly cerebellum – pounded regularly. Jooklo 5 Beans set the bar, creating a disorienting percussion-heavy avant-jazz onslaught with spiralling electric piano that nods towards 70s Miles, but Gutternsipe leap the bar with a maelstrom of drums, guitar and electronics which is somehow pummelling and intricate at the same time. Then Brighton duo Human Leather take the bar, break it over their knee and wade into us like Begbie on a bad day with their outstanding sludge-punk, guttural syllabic vocals making each song sound like the mating call of the Judoon. Which leaves NYC’s Imperial Triumphant to replace the bar with a solid platinum battleaxe and enact a ritual culling, their baroque widescreen black metal matched by their polished high priest masks; believe it or not, their name is an understatement; double believe it or not, Kenny G is on their new album, which is surely a first for a Supernormal act.

Speaking of heaviness, Lo Egin add sax and trombone to a metal template, finding a space between New Orleans funeral parades and doom trudges. It’s a brass metal fusion...or do we mean alloy? Skull Mask from Mexico also stretch traditions by drizzling rootsy guitar licks with eerie hurdy-gurdy noise, until it’s like listening to a mariachi musician via haunted ear canals.   

But there is also room on the bill for subtlety and delicacy. Violist Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh plays one of the few sets in Braziers House, summoning a web of harmonics and glissandi from which fragments of folk motifs can be picked, like the shanties of the damned. Alison Cotton’s closing set in the Barn on Friday also uses viola, but creates a more spectral sound to which haunting vocals are added, in a style reminiscent of some of Sheila Chandra’s drone-based work. Hannah Silva weaves a spell often with voice alone, looping imitations of infant burbling and producing live recreations of glitched recordings, like a post-modern Norman Collier, and an even deeper enchantment is cast by Noriko Okaku and Helen Papaioannou with “That Long Moonless Chase”, utilising the immersive potential of The Vortex stage to show beautiful animation interpreting a collage of two folktales from different continents which have been mangled by online translation services, plus a bit of skronking sax, just to stay on the Supernormal brand.

Chip Priests

I just got back from Supernormal festival, so you can look forward to a review in the forthcoming Nightshift (preview: it was ace).  Here's my latest for MusicOMH in the interim.  

HOT CHIP – FREAKOUT/RELEASE (Domino)

Boogie is long overdue a mainstream revival. The misleadingly monikered microgenre added a bit of gutsy R & B bounce to sleek disco rhythms as the 70s bled into the 80s, and then played them in such an intensely uptight, airtight fashion you’d think they were planning on sending twelve inch singles to the Mariana Trench. What admirer of early Foals’ buttoned-down pop wouldn’t get a finicky frisson from Earth, Wind & Fire’s cover of "Got To Get You Into My Life"? How many people nodding along to the airbrushed sounds of Everything Everything wouldn’t find something to like in the antiseptic rubber bounce of Heatwave or Pure Energy? Hot Chip might be leading the revival by building "Down", the opening track from their eighth album, around a loop from boogie obscurity "More Than Enough", by Universal Togetherness Band.

To keep the wryly knowing groove going, "Eleanor" comes on like an early 80s Kool & The Gang cut at an alternative universe school disco, whereas the title track is chunkier, opening with the repeated robo-mantra “Wild beast/ Freakout, release” - imagine the backing singers from "Electric Avenue" trying to remake Fatboy Slim’s "Eat, Sleep, Rave, Repeat" and you’re halfway there - and ending with a delicious Chicago house descending synth line; it even has a slight similarity in the vocal line to "We Are Family", just to retain the vintage mobile disco vibe. But this opening trio is a trick, wrongfooting you into an album, not of retro-bangers, but of restrained and introspective keyboard contemplations. Despite the Dionysian flavour of the title, Freakout/Release could more accurately be titled Comedown/Regret, wistfully noting the passing of the good times. The lyrics return to this post-party melancholia again and again, the mojo having fled suddenly, pop euphoria having been replaced by the quotidian: “Music used to be escape, now I can’t escape it” ("Freakout/Release"); “We raise our glasses in remembrance/ When only yesterday we took our chance” ("Not Alone"); “Ain’t it hard to be funky when you’re not feeling sexy?” ("Hard To Be Funky"). Hot Chip’s previous album was entitled Bath Of Ecstasy, but this one is more like a cold shower of middle-aged regret, with a good splurge of Radox Pomegranate, Hibiscus & Remorse exfoliating body scrub.

Not that the music is cold, there’s a swirled-brandy warmth to these songs which rescues them from self-pity. "Broken" has a stately resignation which is part Pet Shop Boys, part barely remembered Canadian synth-poppers Kon Kan, "Miss The Bliss" is Frazier Chorus chilling out post-club, and "Not Alone" has a soft fuzziness which is not far from current festival faves Glass Animals, but the clearest sonic touchstone is The Beloved (albeit without the loved-up, starry-eyed grins). The whole album is perfect earbud fodder, well balanced and rich, and with plenty of interesting elements to pick out on later listens - check the dirty, dirty bass break in the title track, or the freeze-dried Chic guitar of "Hard To Be Funky". Only "The Evil That Men Do" falls flat, trying to be a woozy shuffle but coming across as a messy, half-recalled Seal song (though maybe we’re still smarting from discovering it wasn’t an Iron Maiden cover). 

"Out Of My Depth", however, is an outstanding closer, an affirmatory torch song over epically phased keys which owes a little to 21st century Sparks, and even shares some DNA with the theatrical  valediction of Queen’s "The Show Must Go On". With a promise to “make time my only enemy”, perhaps this song makes peace with the ruefulness and contrition of the preceding eight tracks. This album is a pleasing, mature release...though a little more freakout wouldn’t have gone amiss.