I have now reviewed Supernormal so many times I think I might take a rest next year and let someone else have a crack...course, I'll still attend, it's the best festival ever.
SUPERNORMAL, Braziers Park, 1-3/8/25
“Come onstage with me if you want to get out of the rain”. When did you ever hear a festival act propose that? But, it's Sunday lunchtime and Loré Lixenberg is opening her performance space to the damp people of Braziers Park, which just about sums up Supernormal, a festival where the line between artist and audience is often blurred, broken, or moshed into oblivion. We should mention that Lixenberg is a highly trained operatic mezzo-soprano and her invitation arose whilst she was interviewing a random member of the public in a sprechgesang style (discovery: the phrase “that’s so bloody typical” is astonishing when delivered like Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder). The interviewee is called Scud, and is an actual legend, talking with wit and passion about the value of public libraries, going full Phil Minton in an impromptu bout of vocal improv, and telling stories of inventing parkour (disputed) and discovering punk as a nipper. Punk acts feature elsewhere this weekend, but the whole event embodies punk’s central tenets “Make it happen!”, “Look out for each other”, and “Be true to yourself”, and is as incredible as ever.
Our Friday starts with Distraxi, who sounds pleasingly like someone howling with rage whilst faxing a kazoo, before we visit The Vortex for the first time. This wonky shed space hosts plenty of multimedia business over the weekend, but the simple show by The Panama Papers is one of the best. The music is mostly lugubrious sax and electronics, with some low intoned vocals somewhere between Swans and Crash Test Dummies, but the magic is in the slideshow projected behind them, in which the Dept of Improvised Investigations hilariously claims that noise and improv are a front or tax dodge – can selling 20 home-made tapes be a viable business model?
Rory Salter suggests it can, perhaps, because the Barn stage is so packed we can’t see what on earth he’s doing, but we love the drifting tones that sound by turns like Snap, Crackle & Pop doing plumbing in Twin Peaks, a Woookiee crèche, and To Rococo Rot making balloon animals.
Folk is a large part of Supernormal, tapping into the spirit of homegrown rebellion that’s existed for centuries. The Charmers are a coven folk quintet with a “Song for the dykes...a spell for the banished”. Milkweed perform a cosmic folk horspiel based on an Ulster Cycle tale which we admittedly can’t follow, but the fuzzy rustic lope is a delight. They introduce a pair of vocalists for one passage, who turn out to be Bridget & Kitty, from the Round Table folk club in London. They perform unaccompanied duets in Braziers House on Saturday which are unfussy and beautifully controlled and crystalline, a world away from that theatrical barleymow “folk-singer accent” we’ve all heard. That an apparently unrelated song is dedicated to Palestine without any stretch shows the communicative power of these old compositions.
If folk music is earthy, immediate, and deeply bloodthirsty, Gorgon Vomit are a folk band, being an excellently intense old-school metal pummel party, with guitars whinnying like rabid Kazakh horses. They have a Jamaican vocalist, and track names like ‘Babylon Detonator’, but this actually makes very little difference – possibly because metal is universal and inclusive of everyone, and possibly because you can never hear the lyrics, anyway. Headbanging with dreads makes you look like a metal Medusa, though, so props for that.
Quieter pleasures are on offer, though, like Judith Hamann whose wordless vocals and cello are ECM ambience meets Arvo Pärt meets a gate swinging in the wind. Slow bowing like a calm but wintry sea alternates with quick light taps on the neck, hypnotically.
A Widget is something small, oddly shaped, but useful, which fits this band, featuring a guitarist from Big Joanie, and our own Zahra Haji Fath Ali Tehrani on drums. They make a strangely lopsided funk pop, somewhere between ESG and Hall & Oates, with one tune even sounding like a cheeky Chic. The vocals are blokey and spoken, but with a wry warmth taking us to the sunny side of The Streets. They’re a pier-end, market-stall British version of a knowing post-post-punk groove band - Elsie Tanner Soundsystem, anyone?
There's another local win on Sunday, when Oxford’s improv hero Pat Thomas duets with drummer Dan Johnson, eschewing keys in favour of...maybe a tablet? All we can see is Pat sitting studiously in a beret like a French professor at a ludicrously vast table. Regardless of how the noises are generated, they sound fantastic, electronic chitters intertwining with skittering drums. Later in the set the beats get chunkier and we are strafed with blurts and clatters – this is probably what it’s like to play Donkey Kong from inside one of the barrels.
En Creux is the solo work of Lucia H Chung, a London-based Taiwanese artist, with no-input mixer. Listen for a few seconds and it’s just static and crackle; listen for two minutes and spotty rhythms emerge; after 10 we hear classic electro grooves crossed with manic squeaks, like Egyptian Lover rogering a bouncy castle. Remember Eddie Large’s routine about celebs starting their cars? Imagine that covered by Autechre.
Abstraction is physical not aural at the BRUK UP dance workshop. It’s fascinating to learn about the avant-dancehall moves – think a middle ground between breakdance, the Thriller video, and trying to cross a ropebridge whilst wankered – but it seems Nightshift doesn’t have as many shoulder muscles as the instructor...
Given its ostensibly inclusive can-do nature, it’s a surprise you don’t see more physically disabled punk performers, as this music comes from spirit and rage, not the corporeal (with the occasional exception of blood alcohol content). Sublux are a churning hardcore band fronted by two wheelchair users, one of whom has a proper incandescent shriek, and the other of whom has a little machine that makes bleepy noises almost without cessation, whether a song is playing or not. Feral.
Soundart Radio’s shack allows anyone to sign up and broadcast sounds online, and through small speakers near the main gate. Counter-intuitively, the shows that work the best are those that veer away from Supernormal styles: local noise artist Plague Arish layers up some excellent tape hisses and hums, with thudding submerged rhythms that sound like a helicopter trying to take off in a blancmange, but draws a sparse audience, whereas a handstand competition and Vengaboys tunes get the crowds going. Context is everything, we guess.
