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.