Supernormal 2024 Part 3

 Shocking material gets a far more original airing in Fish El Fish’s set in The Vortex, a blacked out, and sometimes unbearable stuffy stage hosting many multimedia shows. Accompanied by visceral collages of images from medical textbooks, and over rubbery squelches and thick gloopy effects, a pitched-down voice recites a barely comprehensible monologue dealing with corporeal disgust, sexual shame, and a shocking new interpretation of the children's TV show title Johnny Ball Reveals All [Can we check with Ginny Lemon’s lawyers before publication?]. Far from a harrowing experience, the set is hilarious, especially when the speaker sounds like Mark Radcliffe’s Fat Harry White persona stuck near an equine orgy in a traffic jam. Appealingly appalling. Other acts who harness the power of the Vortex’s large projection screen are Wojciech Rusin, whose digital animations of mutating classical architecture are joined by harp, contrabassoon and a mezzo singing parts that wouldn’t be out of place in a Handel opera, all of which are inevitably electronically fucked with, and Susannah Stark, capturing Sheila Chandra’s folk-drone vocal style alongside single accordion notes and hushed percussion beneath a huge abstraction monochrome drawing. But La Brea Pulpit work the venue the best in compete darkness except for two thin blue spotlights, making their oppressively complex, restless electronic noise all the more intense. If Space Invaders were filmed with the merciless detail of Saving Private Ryan’s opening scene, then cowering under one of those crumbling bombed bridges might sound exactly like this. 

Punk of course finds its place on the line-up, picks being Bristol’s Gimic, who bring a surprisingly groovy shimmy to artcore bludgeons, Fashion Tips’ Chicks On Speed energy, and the barely processable skree-treble wall of Cuntroaches, who destroy grindcore beats and Motörhead riffs with digital noise and whose version of ‘Happy Birthday’ makes Hendrix’s ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ sound like James Last. Some acts are punk in outlook rather than sound, notably Slagheap, a joyous quartet who can hardly play, but whose inept, barely formed songs have a weirdly cohesive pop centre, and whose lyrics about eating too much pie are worryingly relatable. Some very young children also bash out a clunky stumbling creche and burn clatter after the GLARC workshop, and they are already making improv jams twice as well as Al Karpenter, a band whose vacuous jumble of charmless noises and cool posturing quickly irritates.  

However, although a couple of acts gesture towards topics without expanding the discourse – sure, equality good, capitalism bad, but how about a tune? - there are very few missteps on the bill, and some towering highlights. Sister Punch is an indescribable piece of Commedia dell’Arse theatre in which a gone-to-seed Mario wrestles a slutty dogperson and bursts balloons, and Zohastre are drums, electronics, tape hiss through a wah-wah pedal, and an unnerving plastic owl – the part where it sounds like a hurdy-gurdy playing Underworld’s ‘Rez’ made us grin like fools. Also up there are Tristwych Y Fenywod, with misty and airy Welsh vocals, a tiny plucked dulcimer through delay, muddy dub bass and ‘Metal on Metal’ digital drums. Imagine Broadcast doing Clannad. Smote’s set builds from the machine-tooled repetition of Einstellung, through Can-tight grooves, to Pelican post-metal flourishes, and is bloody great. But perhaps the act we enjoy most is CHEWY SHE, who leap from a Hawkwind synth intro to ultra-tight Sparks-flavoured electro-disco, with impeccable choreography and even costume changes. Who’d have thought a pinnacle of Supernormal would be rehearsed, professional pop music? Even hardened alt-culture types can back look at their prior expectation at the end of this glorious weekend and say “Sorry, I haven’t a clue what this is”. 

Supernormal 2024 Part 2

 Acts stretching the definition of musical sonics are YOL, who simply rubs items against the floor to make squeaky gate/hiccupping chicken sounds whilst ranting about a “national bucket hat shortage” for 12 minutes (which is about 20 times better than you imagine), and Mosquito Farm, much of whose set involves bouncing balls into close-miked vessels on a jumble of retort stands - or more accurately, mostly missing – over clanky loops. It looks like a carney rube failing to win at an alchemist’s sideshow, and sounds like Tom Waits’s relaxation tape. The Thicket stage mostly hosts rituals and magical lectures this year, and whilst Janis & The Sonic Travellers’ performance – a kimchi recipe disguised as a seance, enlivened by La Monte Young violin spirals – is diverting, the area feels under utilised. Having said that, nipping over in the early evening on the dubious advice of a punter who claims that Dr Jerry Thackray (FKA journalist Everett True) was going to cover Fall songs there, we discover a deserted glade and the enchanting ambience of Matthew Olden’s sonic installation ‘The Irrepressible Force’, a computer-controlled mélange of drones and creaks; at Supernormal even a prank turns out to be an epiphany. 

Our time in Ipsden would not be complete without some free improv in the barn, the pick of which features Rachel Musson (sax), Mark Sanders (drums), and Matt Davis (trumpet), whose technique is less extended than elongated, playing through the spit valve and using a tambourine as a mute. 

Techno is well represented this year. Nkisi closes Friday’s live roster with what sounds like an 80s Doctor Who tension cue stretched out for an hour. We get turn of the millennium glitchy loops from Dangsha, squishing Mille Plateaux style clicks into thick, compacted, fuzzy minimal techno: Underfelt Resistance, anyone? Two consecutive sets are more danceable, the classic late-90s crusty style of Portugal’s excellently gurning Zancudo Berraco reminding us of Meat Beat Manifesto and the more urbane of Megadog’s regulars, whilst Rrose’s hypnotic rhythms are more sleek and inhuman. Rrose presumably took their name from Marcel Duchamp’s female alter-ego, proving that drag and high art have been connected for a long time, and there’s a strong queer cabaret element to this year’s line-up; if the frankly filthy Midgitte Bardot has the best name, Ginny Lemon reduces us to childish giggles, drawing us into the tent with a riff on Verka Serduchka’s Eurovision classic ‘Dancing Lasha Tumbai’, and keeping us in there dicking about like a hungover avant-Chuckle Brother. Their improbably funny rewriting of ‘Toxic’ about RuPaul has a “few legal edits”, and therefore is entirely composed of wordless mumbles. Lydia Lunch is less guarded in conversation, baldly calling Nick Cave a cunt, whilst dropping such nuggets as, “A nice clean set of balls goes a long way”. She’s an amusing X-rated raconteur, but her schtick is ultimately the rehearsed platitudes and self-caricature of more mainstream after-dinner speakers. 

You Know My Ipsden Lie

Supernormal is always fantastic, but this was one of the best. I very much hope it returns in 2025.

SUPERNORMAL, Braziers Park, 2-4/8/24 

The opening act at Supernormal is Spiritual Advisor & Nice Strangers, about which the programme states, “Sorry, I haven’t a clue what this is”. We can’t tell whether this is the compiler giving up, an obscure conceptual joke, or a hint that Graeme Garden will be doing some bucolic festival puns - “Bring me the hedge of Alfredo Garcia!” - but the fact that we considered all of these options and more proves the extent to which Supernormal sits outside the standard festival experience. If the average music weekender consists of acts trotting out their biggest hits, punters killing time until the headliners arrive, epic queues and agonising bar prices, then Supernormal is a communal experience in which performers and audiences mingle together without a sniff of a VIP area, and in which every change of act offers a surprise...not always a welcome one, mind, but that’s part of the fun. Connections can be drawn between acts all over the bill, so in true Supernormal spirit, this review will entirely ignore the running order. 

Shake Chain are a band we’ve seen many times in Oxford. In most environments the clear split between the band on stage playing excellently wiry post-punk and performance artist Kate Mahony doing some maggotty crawling around (or outside) the venue is shocking, but such is the semipermeable membrane between audience and performer at Supernormal, her brattish toddler presence in the crowd barely raises an eyebrow, though her mewling and puking vocals still sound great. Other acts who spurn the stage’s boundaries are Robyn Rocket, who strolls slowly round the field delivering soothing little delayed trumpet lines over ambient washes and susurrations and is probably what they play when the ECM office is hungover, and Maria Uzor, who spends a good percentage of her set dancing or kneeling in front of the stage. Her intriguing, bouncy songs have a pop heart, an experimental mind, and a raver’s sweaty trainers, as she co-opts a vintage Hoover synth sound and a digital tom rhythm resembling Raze’s ‘Break 4 Love’. Slimelord also make some classic genre nods, but not the ones we expect from the name: yes, they can churn out sludge passages, but underneath that they’re barely disguised death metallers, all cantering riffs, barked vocals, and a bassist whose windmilling hair gets caught on the Shed stage’s splintery roof. 

Connections to deeper traditions occur throughout the weekend, especially in those sets happening in or around Braziers House itself. Paul Dunmall’s solo sax set drops in the odd free improv sputter and squawk, but his fluent smiling lines sound more like Paul Desmond with the odd sheet of Coltrane sound, and his piece on soprano gestures towards Parkerish runs and eddies. Paddi Benson & Grace Lemon’s uilleann pipes duos, with a little rhythm guitar underpinning, were inspired by ballroom dances held in Bedlam Hospital, but are not wild or careening, instead inhabiting a lovely space between folk forms and cellular minimalism. We don’t have the expertise to state whether Jali Fily Cissokho’s Senegalese songs exist within any tradition, but we know that his kora playing is wonderful, spicing delicate cascades of notes with slashing chords. Yakka Doon plays pure 60s coffeehouse folk in the sitting room, and we imagine John Renbourn or Bert Jansch chiming in at any moment. An acapella number is especially beautiful, particularly as our position behind a piece of antique furniture means we can’t see anything, and it sounds like a tuneful ghost - “Show the spectre some affection”, as Leo Robinson notes in his modern day take on Harlem Rennaissance/beat jazz poetry. Isiah Hull delivers his writings alongside the band GG, who often sound like a stuttering Slint who can’t quite get started, and we christen the marriage of emotional verses and laissez-faire sonics “slachrymose”.  Wormhook also features spoken word and austere monastic singing, though phrases like “toad pulpit boil nexus” make for more dense texts, accompanied by a pseudo double bass made from a big branch and a length of rough hawser, which creates a powerful guttural rumble, but isn’t big on variation. Infinite Livez’ lyrics are poetic in spirit, but his delivery is soulful and looped, like an understated lofi Jamie Lidell, and his occasional flute invokes Rahsaan Roland Kirk.