#A.R.Kane
We’re ecstatic to announce that Supernormal 2015 will be hosting the first UK show in over twenty years from the maverick and mercurial force that is #A.R.Kane.
The new name adds the ‘#’ symbol, Rudy Tambala explains “We needed a new name that contemporises the band, was a tad ironic, and flatly stated that this line-up is sans Alex. Should Alex come out-to-play, we can easily drop the ‘#’, so to speak”
Rudy has assembled a line-up featuring ” … a couple original A.R.Kane players … and two millennial upstarts of extreme beauty and talent …” to grace us with a repertoire that remains akin to nothing else any dreamer has ever heard, before or since.
For the uninitiated, A.R.Kane was formed by Rudy Tambala and Alex Ayuli, from Stratford in East London. Between 1986 and 1994 A.R.Kane made genre-defying records that radiate with an otherworldly intensity. Early singles like ‘When You’re Sad’ and ‘Lollita’, and later albums like 1988’s ’69’ and 1989’s ‘i’ occupy a unique headspace – by turns hallucinatory, surreal, melodious and darkly erotic, this band’s music traverses into dubbed-out experimentation as seamlessly as groove-based euphoria, celestial expanses of sound and unforgiving noise-based dystopia. Rarely has a band been more haunting, harrowing and heavenly – often all at once – than this one.
12 Hour Foundation
The Twelve Hour Foundation’s live set blends musique concrète / radiophonic backing with vintage analogue synthesizers, to produce a sound that sits somewhere between the works of Paddy Kingsland and John Baker (BBC Radiophonic Workshop), with a dash of Raymond Scott. Bringing to mind the new horizons of a bygone era, their electronic elegies ring out between and beyond the aeons.
20 Jazz Funk Greats DJ
20jazzfunkgreats may well be the longest running mp3 blog on the internet. They have no adverts or sponsorship and their inability to fit into trends or genres has led them to be labeled the John Peel of the blogging world. Expect anything from Italo to Sepultura (and probably some german music too). They might even play some Throbbing Gristle if you ask nicely.
A Band Late Night Interventions
In the early hours, The A Band roam…
A+E
A+E curates and performs in the gaps between performance and experience. Their work is heavily influenced by free improvisation and performance art, with a knowing nod to the absurd.
For Supernormal, A+E will be (amongst other things) hosting a silent feast, inviting their audience under the covers for an improvised musical performance and running a dream exchange service, as well as performing various impromptu Fluxus scores across the weekend.
Drone Blanket:
An improvised live performance performed under large blanket serving to create an ad-hoc venue for an immersive experience that is open to anyone who fancies a noisy snuggle.
The Feast:
A feast will be cooked and served to participants, eating in strictest silence. Sounds created through the feasting ceremony will being the performative act.
WE WILL BUY YOUR DREAMS:
Artist and hypnotist Hannah Drayson hosts this traveling speculative market and dream exchange service. Where do YOU want to go?
Fluxus Scores:
Various Fluxus (and similar) text scores for musical and non-musical activities are performed ad-hoc over the course of the weekend with scores submitted by passers-by performed.
Rummaging:
A physical noise-music performance where junk objects are manically manipulated and man-handled to the point of insanity.
Keep an eye out for See the village green notice board for timing for specific events or
AAS
unique can of expanse destroys (heavy) twilight consciousness. haunting, celestial, magick. their history. this realm. the come. inhabiting lurches. the seer. unearthly, into abstraction. extreme uninitiated haunting. rarely circuitry of band. erotic lulling traverses unique horror. unheimlich locale. between into and by. unforgiving beauty. made music sound historical or nothing. dreamer. euphoria. nothing. original intensity. subsumed will. the abstraction. that music darkly. before.
AAS will perform an improvised audio drone with accompanying ritual. The performance will be an actualisation of a rite previously performed in a dream earlier this year.
After Hours Games
Last year, playworker Kelda Lyons came to Supernormal for the first time and was inspired by how playful everyone was…
This year she will lead some after hours games on Sunday night to help round off the festival. Join in with some semi (dis) organised fun.
AHRKH / KHOM / WEAVER
потеряли-космонавт is a collaborative piece by three sonic and visual artists aims to sum up cold war space exploration, the terror and wonder of extra-terrestrial life, what the artists term “a plunge pool of the senses, The sounds, the feelings, the experience of being utterly alone, helplessly drifting further and further into the unknown, brought to the audience by way of live visual and audio manipulations, blurring the lines between live musical performance, cinematic experience and art installation”
Angus Braithwaite
In light of his recent research, artist Angus Braithwaite will speak, demonstrate using props or both on a topic related to the act of dowsing and the a-cult.
Angus Braithwaite studied Fine Art at Newcastle University and the Slade School of Art. Recent solo exhibitions include: Trees Native or Otherwise, Palagkas, London (2014). Selected group exhibitions and performances include: Slip, Stadtische Gallery, Villingen-Schwenningen, Germany (2015); Supernormal (performance), Braziers Park, Oxfordshire (2015); Multiplicities, Art Seen, Nicosia, Cyprus (2015); Buster Keaton and the Logic of Objects (performance), The Warwick Arts Centre, Warwick (2013); The World Turned Upside Down, Mead Gallery, Warwick (2013); The Everything and Nothing Problem, The Jerwood Space, London (2013); We Object, Aid & Abet, Cambridge (2013); The Sea Is In My Veins (performance), Whitstable Biennale, Kent (2012).
Animal Magic Tricks: Experiments in Sound Collecting
Animal Magic Tricks will lead participants to explore the hidden energy of the Supernormal grounds measuring electromagnetic fields, conductivity, radio waves, micro sounds and water recording their findings as audio. The sounds will be processed and re-configured as live audio mixes and improvisations and collaboratively translated into a visual map of hidden sounds which will be digitised after the festival and available for SN-ers to enjoy. Animal Magic Tricks is the music & sound project of Frances Laura Donnelly.
Anonymous Bash
Anonymous Bash began live as the first Samarbeta Residency programme, in which infamous This Heat drummer/vocalist Charles Hayward arrived at Salford’s Islington Mill and led a troupe of local musicians in a collaborative project, resulting in their album of December 2014. Since then, the band has reconfigured into a live outfit that dispenses a blistering array of breakneck rhythms and out-rock dub workouts. Witnessing a triumphant showing at Cafe Oto in which lethal band chemistry cast an electrifying spell on the throng, Supernormal had no hesitation in setting about bringing this vibrant collective to Braziers Park. Featuring members of Gnod, Hungry Ghost, Locean and 2 Koi Karp, Anonymous Bash are a many-headed beast not to be messed with.
Anthony Chalmers DJ
The instigator of live music night Baba Yagas Hut and Raw Power Festival spins some tunes from the depths….
Anti Record Workshop & Set
An ‘anti-record’ is a musical vinyl record which has been treated (melted, drilled, painted, glued etc.) so that it becomes a ‘noise record’. While this term was first used by LAYLAH Records on conventional vinyl releases by Current 93, Nurse With Wound and others, Ron Lessard of RRRecords applied the term to a series of physically altered records released by RRR in 1988.” – wikipedia.
This activity will enable participants to engage in the act of destruction and re-invention of the lauded vinyl record and test it’s potential as a material to become a sculptural object.
Workshop leader Jason Williams will end the activity by revisiting the ‘Unplayable Jukebox’ (first seen at the Phoenix gallery Brighton) where anti records were commissioned from various noise / visual artists and then the non-playability of these items tested on an “indestructible turntable”.
Årabrot
Norway’s finest institution of full-frontal riff and rancour, who come across somewhat like what Charles Baudelaire might have come up with if he’d been on Amphetamine Reptile records, were booked in to play last year’s event, yet had to cancel due to circumstances beyond their control. Thus, we’re all the more delighted to have ’em back to violate the countryside with their unique and inimitable brand of deviant noise and wilful perversity.
Archbishops of Banterbury
a) Cathexis writ anabases? vis a viz, islands: capital OR art
A desire to throw the toys out and pull the pram over from the inside, all boxlike game play entrapment. The argument that returns. Shoot some dudes.
b) There are erratic lights; speculate, speculu(u)m: [if you’ll forgive the egregious sibilance], specious histories might posit one and t’other more proximal than actually.
c) There is such a thing as improvised music. She is imagined. A break/through of light and violence. Explosion of pattern emerges from chaos.
d) There is such a thing as poetry*. She is all of modus, locus, ellipses alpha-aleph//
//space mind-to-mind through. Sense-Shouting-Silence Engineer.
e) A commune and a communism are foils to rank and file saprophytes; as of 2015, Object-UK is vulcanised blood and despair.
f) These are notes towards but not descriptive of a performance.
g) The personnel of that performance is yet-undecided.
h) The performance will consist of poetry and improvised music.
i) “Bread trees spinning, dripping with butter/ Just 6 inches higher than your upstretched middle finger” [MES]
j) Skein-rhetoric wrapped around naif-noumenal ‘pretence’ is the grandiloquent self-abasement of the sodden reactionary fucking ‘liberal’.
k) Get tae fuck.
*Spoken word implies the denuding of language to bare εἶδος, linguistic ataxia, the alacrity of jaundiced bone-for-banquet.
Artist Plinth Project with Glasgow School of Art
We are relocating the artist plinth from the formal locations of museums and galleries to an outdoor rural environment. Invited to experiment both with their practice and traditional modes of display, MFA students from Glasgow School of Art have been selected to make new work that considers the plinth within the context of Supernormal.
Artists include:
Uesung Lee
Jamie Russom
Rodrigo Red
Judith Leupi
Katie Schwab
Sam Cook
Artist Plinth Project with Glasgow School of Art: group discussion led by Gill Ord
We are relocating the artist plinth from the formal locations of museums and galleries to an outdoor rural environment. Invited to experiment both with their practice and traditional modes of display, MFA students from Glasgow School of Art have been selected to make new work that considers the plinth within the context of Supernormal.
Join Gill Ord and the artists taking part in the project to discuss their work within the context of Supernormal.
Gill Ord was one of the founders of Braziers International Artists Workshop, which began at Braziers Park in 1995. Each year the workshop bought together up to 30 artists of different nationalities for 16 days to work, exchange dialogue and experiment in a way that is mutually beneficial. Finishing in 2010, Supernormal took it’s place as a three-day event and an expanded programme of activity open to the public.
Asparagus Piss Raindrop
Asparagus Piss Raindrop are a crypto conceptual science fiction anti climax band dedicated to pushing beyond all reasonable limits what live music performance can be. APR is formed from a dreadful, ever-expanding pool of performer/composer/improvisers from the Glasgow experimental music scene.
The group‘s work arises from the questions; How can we do things otherwise? What musical forms arise from and inform our daily experience? Performances typically draw on such things as recycled children’s games, group therapy, shapeshifting, declarations of ridiculous texts, geology, architectural intervention, gender theory, site specificity and slug reproduction. APR have been commissioned to produce work by Tectonics Glasgow, Tectonics Iceland, Transmission Gallery Glasgow and Association CRIC in France.
Benedict Drew
Benedict Drew is an artist who works across video, sculpture, music. Recent exhibition ‘Heads May Roll’ (Matt’s Gallery, London 2014) was ‘a total headfuck of flickering screens, pulsating lights and ear-splitting sounds’, as reviewed by Time Out London. Benedict will be presenting a new performance for the Vortex.
Benjamin Finger
Hailing from Oslo, Benjamin Finger worked as a photographer and film-maker before making his mark as a musician, and his impressionistic and haunted style belies this cross-disciplinary approach; utilising a classical approach to collage and musique concrète whilst maintaining a dreamlike and atmospheric allure. Benjamin arrives at Supernormal courtesy of this year’s partnership with Blue Tapes.
Blood Sport
Blood Sport hail from Sheffield, and use a needle-sharp, mathematical approach – rooted in hi-life as techno as post-punk – to create a formidable intensity of delivery and a wide-eyed joy of approach. Fans of Nisennenmondai, This Heat and Elektro Guzzi should look no further than this brazen display of sacred sonic geometry.
Blown Out
Ushering in the sixth dimension via heady spirals of acidic guitar scree and telepathic band chemistry, this titanically powerful Newcastle-based three piece are as much descended spiritually from the transcendental vibrations of Pharoah Sanders as the vortex-voyaging of early Monster Magnet, yet their freeform extra-terrestrial extrapolations stand alone. Featuring seasoned Supernormal vet Mike Vest along with members of Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, Blown Out are an expanding universe of sound.
Blue Tapes DJ
Still looking for the sound that makes everything alright, Blue Tapes protagonist David McNamee is on hand to play some records (and tapes) from the Blue Tapes archive.
Blue Tapes Showcase
We are delighted to be partnering with Blue Tapes – a boutique cassette label specialising in handmade packaging, alternative process artwork, and curious audio who will present a showcase of national and international artists from their label at Supernormal this year.
So far Blue Tapes present mysterious and enigmatic Italian occultists Father Murphy and Norwegian composer and film-maker Benjamin Finger to the programme with more in the pipeline to be announced.
Editions of Blue Tapes and X Ray Record releases will be available, replete with beautiful analogue cyanotype cover art, alongside a limited edition Supernormal split release and Blue Tapes DJ set.
Bonnacons Of Doom
These shadowy Merseyside satyrs of drone and repetition have been well known for making the foundations of any building they perform in shake, so lord knows what they’ll do to the countryside; in another of the site-specfic installations that have already taken them to Liverpool Cathedral and it’s Psych Fest, the Bonnacons will descend on Braziers with ritual and monomania on their mind.
Box of Delights: Animation Film Programmes for Children
The Independent Cinema Office is delighted to have partnered with the British Animation Awards to present these two compilations of award-winning short films for children. With cheerful, dialogue-free stories from across Europe, the programmes feature a dazzling variety of animation techniques, exploring stories and themes full of creativity and humour.
Programme 1 specially selected for 4-7 year olds
Eight award-winning short films from the British Animation Awards. A more cheerful collection of stories from around Europe you will not find, full of music, colour and character but no dialogue.
Programme 2 aimed at 8-12 year olds
Nine award-winning short films from the British Animation Awards. An amazing variety of animation techniques from filmmakers around Europe, exploring stories and themes full of creativity and humour.
Braziers Nature Walk
Join a member of the Braziers community on a guided tour of the 55 acre estate, identifying and appreciating the vast array of flora and fauna to be discovered across it’s land, organic kitchen garden and livestock.
Broken DC
Charting a collision course between post-hardcore ballast, expansive songcraft and feverish guitar scree, the London-based Broken DC are as sharply angular as they are emotionally engaging. Featuring ex-members of Capicorns and Pettybone, they’ve traced a pathway from the punk scene of their roots to the skies, with gritty attitude and dynamic intensity as their ammunition.
Buckner Building
Buckner Building are a duo based in London. Naomi Graham trained as a recorder player in Melbourne, Australia and then the Guildhall London. In 1995 she moved to Munich where she performed regularly at the A*Devantgarde music festival and the Munich Biennale as well as with the Bavarian State Opera Orchestra.Recent collabora-tions include ‘Her noise-Feminisms and the sonic with Crisap at Tate Modern, London.
Fritha Jenkins toured Europe playing violin, keyboard and mandolin with folk-thrash trailblazers Skyclad in the 90’s. Since then she has played and performed a diverse range of music from bluegrass to punk.
Buckner Building lead your ears to places not always easily defined. Field recordings find their way into reinterpretations of old english carols, north african folksong and original compositions. Prepared sounds, live improvisation and looping on violin, re-corders, english bagpipes and vocal all play their part in Buckner Building’s live per-formance and recordings.
Build a cardboard speaker sound system with X Marks the Bökship
Based in London, artists’ bookshop X Marks the Bökship presents a selection of artist’s Vinyls, CDs, Tapes & digital files along with independent publications and zines.
Join X Marks the Bökship to collectively construct a cardboard speaker sound system in the main field and look out for artists records on sale at Supernormal courtesy of the Bökship.
c(o)unterculture – women’s land
A tiny space within a small countercultural festival, designated as women’s land.
Join us.
A c(o)untercultural space.
Join us.
There will be sea, rocks, vegetation, a flagpole and room for one person.
Join us.
The island will be a beautiful space, more wonderful than you can imagine.
Join us.
Enticing.
Join us.
Rachael will read to listeners from the island from IMPORTANT key texts. Dan Graham. Spare Rib. Beatrix Potter. Wikipedia. Other IMPORTANT stuff.
Join us.
Women are invited to take a turn on the island to further c(o)unterculture and claim women’s land. You may protest, choose a flag to fly, take a selfie, grow your body hair, talk, sing, perform or simply breathe women’s air on women’s land.
Join us.
Gender of participants will not be policed or questioned.
Join us.
C(o)unterculture Women’s Land is a project by artist Rachael House.
Cacophonous Sarcophagus DJ
Purveyors of experimental music gigs in the hub of the South West, Caco Sarco will no doubt play some unthinkable sounds for the masses.
Charles Hayward-begin anywhere
A song cycle by legendary sometime This Heat multi-instrumentalist Charles Hayward, to be performed in the drawing room on the Braziers house piano.
Check!!!
Arriving courtesy of this year’s Supernormal partnership with Blue Tapes, this Tokyo-based self-styled ‘electronic jam band’ conjure up relentlessly experimental shapes that are as commonly beat-driven and propulsive as they are drifting and expansive. Transcendental moods and uncanny approach are the order of the day when dealing with these three fearless voyagers into the audial unknown, making their fist visit to this country especially for Supernormal with support from the Sasakawa Foundation.
Colour Walk Tent
Colour Walk is a project by artist Lucy Steggals as an extension of on-going project ‘Colour Mining’. Colour Walk is a constantly evolving physical archive of colour observations made by the public. It is on tour for the duration of the Colour Mining Project. Its intention is to invite people to explore colour and to extend the Colour Mining conversation. Colour Walk visits different locations with the aim of gathering data related to people’s personal thoughts, feelings and experiences of the spectrum colours.
The Colour Walk Archive Tent (in collaboration with Monkphat) at Supernormal will explore the site of Braziers Park to gather data and extend conversations related to people’s thoughts, experiences and explorations of the seven colour spectrums.
Costume and Song Jousting
Artists Thoms and Hudson lead a workshop for festival goers to make their own costumes from an array of fabrics and natural materials such as vines, straw, leaves and other found materials drawing on traditional folk customs such as mummers plays and wassailing. The workshop will draw on resources provided to develop characters about communal costumed folk customs of Britain from historical influences and contemporary life contributing to an resulting performance created by workshop participants.
Crying Lion
The Crying Lion are an unaccompanied 4 part harmony singing group from Glasgow featuring members of Trembling Bells (Alex Neilson and Lavinia Blackwall) and Muldoon’s Picnic (Harry Campbell and Katy Cooper). The group combine elements of such vocal traditions as American Sacred Harp, Gregorian chant, Medieval Madrigal and English Folk all refracted through Alex Neilson’s songwriting to forge a sound that is intimate and glorious
Deathcount In Silicon Valley-Nosferatu Live Soundtrack
Deathcount In Silicon Valley is the fevered brainchild of London-based experimental musician Andi Nixon, whose kaleidoscopic synthscapes and extra-dimensional excursions have always been as heavily informed by cinematic tension and soundtrack innovation as they have by retro-futurist chic and late-night epiphanies. It seems oddly fitting then that he’ll be bringing his live soundtrack version of the 1922 silent classic Nosferatu to Braziers Park, and effectively placing himself on a psychic continuum that unites the horror of the last century, the countryside of the present day, and the cephalic spectacles of the future.
Deirdre Me
Hostess with the mostess Deirdre Me will be on hand as the Supernormal compere for the weekends frivolities. Look out for the most orange person you are likely to see in the field – quite possibly with a bottle of gin in hand and you will have found Deirdre Me.
Deidre will also present her new one-woman show ‘It’s Time To Deirdrealize’…..
If you could be any adjective, what would you be? What if I told you that that adjective was the essence of who you already are*, but haven’t been brave enough to be. It’s time to get brave. It’s time to wake up and Deirdrealize!
*Deirdre cannot accept any responsibility for who you really are, returns are not accepted, your consumer rights are probably affected.
Deirdrelization
Deirdre Me brings her new one-woman show ‘It’s Time To Deirdrealize’ to Supernormal….. If you could be any adjective, what would you be? she asks. It’s time to get brave. It’s time to wake up and Deirdrealize!
DIY FM Transmitter Workshop
Artists Magz Hall, Jim Backhouse, Tim Pickup and Nicola Schauerman of Radio Arts, inspired by the free radio activism of Tetsuo Kogawa, will be hosting a mini-FM workshop at which you can build your own transmitter, gather sounds and be part of a collective mobile broadcast installation.
DIY prop-making and stagecraft workshop with Fallopé and The Tubes
Fallopé and The Tubes is Sarah Messenger, Ruby Pester, Nadia Rossi, Rachel Walker and Catherine Weir. The band are a group of Glasgow based artists who work collaboratively to devise live performances as Fallopé and The Tubes. Each live show features their lovingly hand crafted yet somewhat tasteless visuals, shameless zero-budget costumes, sculpture and visual props.
To prepare for their performance, Fallopé and The Tubes invite you to join them for a DIY prop-making and stagecraft workshop, suitable for all ages.
DIY Silent Disco
A homemade FM transmitter and a bin liner full of shonky pocket radios – that’s a silent disco right?
Tune in to SupernormalFM (or whatever else you can pick up) and dance out the weekend in dubious style.
Drone Qigong
Align your body, breath, ears and mind in preparation for the days festivities with Rebecca e Davies and Ingrid Plum’s morning Drone Qigong session.
Rebecca e Davies is a classically trained musician and sound artist interested in queer feminist strategies and their relation to performative sound art.
Ingrid Plum creates work that sits between sound art, improvisation, multi-media installation, neo classical and contemporary Nordic folk music using her voice with extended technique, improvisation, field recordings and electronics, to create layered soundscapes, spoken word and song.
Dunning Webster Underwood
DunningWebsterUnderwood’s improvisatory art leaves the conventional métiers of their respective instruments (Turntable, baritone saxophone and tuba) in the dust in search of enlightenment anew. Artist Graham Dunning uses a single turntable with dubplates of field recordings, dentistry tools and other objects to create crackling textures, tones and disjointed noise. Colin Webster is a prolific and experimental improviser who brings a palette of percussive and textural sounds, drawn tones, and raw, searing blasts. Meanshile, Sam Underwood is a musician, producer and instrument maker playing brass rasp and deep, drone, doom layers.
Emma Tricca
The beguiling songs of Italian born, London-dwelling singer-songwriter Emma Tricca are suffused by both rich atmosphere and autumnal melancholy, and as wistful as they are wise. Her recent ‘Relic’ album on Bird records forms a perfect showcase for a rare talent, harking back to the eccentricities and careworn aesthetic of classic psych-folk yet with a fresh delivery that’s all Emma’s own.
English Heretic
Inhabiting a twilight world of consciousness that takes in the occult, the darker undercurrents of British history, magick, horror and metaphysical realms, English Heretic seer Andy Sharp recontextualises multi-media sources to “fecundate the imagination”. English Heretic’s bracing and disarming forays into unheimlich realms of consciousness will be sure to dance a perplexing waltz with the historical undercurrents of this Oxfordshire locale.
Exploding Cinema
Driven by an ethos of collectivism, Supernormal festival is the perfect summer showstopper to present The Exploding Cinema. They plan to give you a taste of the way they approach their shows as you sample a moving image extravaganza, with films both from their submission open access process and work from the collective members. There will be a show booklet in cut up montage style, ran through the photocopier the way we like it. Films and performance along with exciting visuals and subtle room tone projections make Exploding Cinema shows extra special. The double edged sword is, you won’t know where to look!
Established in 1992, The Exploding Cinema is run by a collective which anyone can join.
They are constituted to develop new modes of exhibition for DIY media and show all films
submitted at regular open access shows. They oppose the elitism, academicism,industrialism and obscurity of the traditional ‘Independent’ film/video sector and welcome contributions from all film/video/performance practices from the popular to the experimental. Their projection equipment and communication resources are held in common ownership. All ticket sales are used to enhance and promote their shows, not for profit, nor are they financed by state taxes SUCKERS.
Exploding Cinema Kids Show
Be transported to other worlds through the power of your imagination.
Fall vs Sabbath – aoke
Fallopé and The Tubes
Fallopé and The Tubes is Sarah Messenger, Ruby Pester, Nadia Rossi, Rachel Walker and Catherine Weir. The band are a group of Glasgow based artists who work collaboratively to devise live performances as Fallopé and The Tubes. Each live show features their lovingly hand crafted yet somewhat tasteless visuals, shameless zero-budget costumes, sculpture and visual props.
The group was established in January 2014 at Insriach Bothy, Aviemore and have developed their practice during numerous residency experiences across Scotland. By living and working together ‘off grid’ the group have developed experimental techniques to create a collective energy. Fallopé and The Tubes draw influence from a wide range of fringe and mainstream musical genres, as well as sexuality, elements of social satire and self promotion and leftist political ideologies.
Father Murphy
A mysterious force from Italy, Father Murphy have become synonymous with the ‘new Italian occult psychedelia’ of lore and legend. Stylings themselves as “the sound of the Catholic sense of Guilt.
A downward spiral aiming at the bottom of the hollow, and then digging even deeper” this cultish and ritualistic outfit arrive in conjunction with Blue Tapes, destined to flourish as sowers of discord and guardians of giallo.
Fritha Jenkins: Orator
A fountain (formed with London Thames foreshore pieces and London Thames river water) and a collective meander to the Thames upstream to gather water which will then be added to the downstream river water fountain on the field.
Walk: gather at the main festival entrance gate on Saturday from 9.30am and set off at 10am
Maps and water collection bags: can be collected from the Supernormal ‘merch’ tent all weekend
Fritha Jenkins works across performance, sculpture and video. She plays with the mu-sic duo Buckner Building and the art band Ochlocracy Orchestra and is a member of the peer led alternative Masters course Alt MFA. Recent work has included performances at Guest Projects, London, Cabaret Melancholique and a year long residency along the Thames foreshore resulting in several sculptural performances in Docklands spaces. She lives in London and has a studio in The Interview Room project space in Deptford.
In 2012 Fritha invited artist Louise Ashcroft to join her on an expedition to capture a wa-terfall. They travelled to Glendalough, Ireland. Having drunk from a waterfall they drenched themselves in it and then bagged up their clothes and set off back to Euston. Here they put the clothes back on and wrung each other out. In Jan 2013 the resulting film was projected alongside 2 bottles of waterfall evaporating on a lit camping stove. For Supernormal Fritha will be working on a similarly omnidirectional piece in collabora-tion with the spaces of Brazier Park, the festival and the surrounding area.
Ggu:ll
This will mark the first ever show outside of The Netherlands for Tilburg’s Ggu:ll, who are purveyors of a particularly viscous, intense and demonic form of doom-laden dementia, in which moments of spectral light are drowned out by haunted stormclouds. They’re already veterans of Roadburn Festival and Incubate, yet at Supernormal we’ll be lucky enough to see the band participating in a one-off Audio-Visual spectacle with Mancunian maven KHOM, for an immersive and transformative experience from which there will be no psychic escape. Sing, dance and worship the abyss.
Ghold
Volleying forth with a truly nightmarish bass ‘n’ drums onslaught seemingly carved from the core of the earth itself, Ghold could lay claim to being the most obnoxious rhythm section in the universe. Yet with whisper-to-roar dynamics and Melvins-style sleight-of-hand to offer as well as riffage and roar, their most recent effort ‘Of Ruin’ stands giantlike amidst the hordes of heavy amplification-slaves of the mid-2010s.
Gino Ginelli’ s Amazing Sherbert Spaghetti Short Story Workshop for Kids
Members of Utter Kunst host an ad-hoc a story-making workshop especially for Supernormal kids. Using the humble Fairy Tale as an initial source of inspiration, using words, music, making and drawing to fuel the imaginative engine, kids will contribute to creating a short story for a performance finale piece to be observed by baffled parents.
Gnar Hest
Gnar Hest shows weave a complex narrative with live audio reactive visuals and ritual performance. Gnar Hest is adventures in a midi grid = Zonal compositions of woozy detuned synths, collapsing and reforming like cornstarch. Gnar Hest features music and comics by Matt Loveridge (Fairhorns, MXLX), movement by Dylan Mallet and visuals performed by Tara Pattenden (Phantom Chips).
Gnar Hest is presented by Unconscious Archives, an ongoing event series which transverses noise core and vision spectacle bringing together expanded cinema and sonic propositions from London and afar.
Granny Ludski – At Home with the Ludski’s #14
From dada to grandma…. Granny Ludski considers what makes up moving image, art and performance through a stimulating assemblage of moving image and cabaret with At Home with the Ludskis #14 at Supernormal 2015.
Regularly hosting shows at the Rio Cinema, London, the Ludski’s post-contemporary, live entertainment and experimental soirée’s blur the boundaries between film, cabaret and performance art.
Guapo
In a twenty-one year history, Guapo have shifted shapes just as adeptly as they’ve blown minds, delving into Ruins-style noise-rock and Zeuhl-esque grandeur where appropriate, yet their mission has culminated in ‘History Of The Visitation’ and the brand new ‘Obscure Knowledge’ on Cuneiform which use progressive and jazz templates as mere springboards for voyages through nocturnal atmosphere and cinematic tension that marry prodigious chemistry with wild imagination with heart-in-mouth aplomb. Featuring luminaries and alumni from Cardiacs, Gong, Knifeworld and Chrome Hoof, these dark magi are sure to have some tricks up their sleeve for Braziers Park.
Hákarl – DollyDollycore B2B
…playing bare music isn’t it.
Hirvikolari
This fresh project of Teeth Of The Sea members Sam Barton and Mike Bourne sees them utilising processed trumpet and modular synthesis to weave a web of constantly evolving sound that’s as influenced by kosmische rapture as by noise-tinged abrasion. Their ever-improvised meditative tapestries resonate on otherworldly and beguiling frequencies.
Honey Ride Me a Goat
Childhood pals form ridiculous band. Grow up to be gnarly, extraterrestrial skronk wizards from beyond.
Honey Ride Me a Goat will be opening the festival with a barrage of hypercomplex riffage.
Hoofus
Hoofus is the project of the Suffolk-based Andre Bosman, who employs the disquieting atmospheres and feral realms of his homeland as inspiration for soundscapes that balance out vivid atmospherics with uncanny vibrations – summoning the arcane and the intangible that exist both within and beyond the realm of the here and now.
Ill
Emerging screaming from the Manchester DIY punk scene, Ill are malcontents on a mission, using extreme volume, righteous ire and unusual instrumentation as weaponry on a charge to decimate mediocrity. and exhibiting a cerebral stance that stands steadfastly against gender role satisfaction and for dissent and diversity with the power of feral and full-throttle racket. All in their path should fear the Ill-uminati.
ILL DEVO
YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH-YEAH-YEAH-YEAH-YEAH-YEAH-YEAH YEAAAHHH!! ILL DEVO are a Brighton based DEVO tribute band, originally formed as a one off group for a Xmas cover gig. They’re very excited however to brush off the cobwebs on their yellow overalls and dig out the red energy domes one more time for this year’s Supernormal festival, where they’ll bust out all your favourite Devo classics! Featuring members of Slum Of Legs, Lower Slaughter, Nope and Keel Her, amongst other Brighton acts you may or not have heard of…
Interior Architecture
Karl M V Waugh, mastermind of Interior Architecture, is an oft-seen figure in the Brighton noise and poetry underground, appearing in Binnsclagg, The Zero Map, The A Band and any amount of free improv experiences. This new project is a full sensory experience, simulating a psychedelic alien environment of indeterminate rules. Utilising custom software to create an ever shifting monochromatic abstract landscape. The generative visuals will use chaotic algorithms to alter and develop over time.
Islington Mill Pink Shed Takeover
This year our friends at Islington Mill will take over the Pink Shed to become it’s own mill-style-micro-venue where artists and audience alike are welcome to enter, join in, observe, participate. Creating a new extended entrance, clamber through the rabbit warren to discover variable happenings and creative exchanges including:
Blind Battles – improv duets
5th Dimension Millformation
Braziers Islington Discs – artist dj sets
Pot Luck meals – bring along some food to share (introductions essential)
With merch from the Mill from: Tesla Tapes, Supernormal fave’s GNOD and 5th dimension sunglasses (whatever they may be!)
Jamie Russom
Jamie Russom is drawn towards repetition and experimentation integrating an empirical approach to art making. Themes of transformation and the ephemeral are highly significant motifs that resurface throughout each work. By formulating a hypothesis, then relinquishing control of its outcome, she allows for an authentic approach and result to emerge. Jamie relies on the use of still and moving images to document this process, which is considered performative in nature. The record serves as evidence of the event, while simultaneously existing as an independent yet connected artwork, transformed from the original.
Jamie Russom is part of the Artist Plinth Project, which presents new work by MFA students from Glasgow School of Art.
Jennifer Walshe
Irish experimental vocalist, musician and artist Jennifer Walshe has a flourishing sixteen-year-plus career of innovative and captivating performance pieces to her name, and brings two brand new works to Supernormal.
Joel Cahen – A Cacophonic Set
Host of long standing abstract mash up show on Resonance FM. Plays aquadelic sonic artifacts under and over the water surface at swimming pools with Wet Sounds. Organises public Destructivist activities with Scrap Club and composes augmented reality locative sonic fictions with Interzone Theatre.
The cacophonous set takes the direction of the current Resonance FM shows. A simultaneous sound collage which superimposes layers of different musical sources over each other: trans-genred music, field recordings, text, and any sound content I can get my hands on in an improvised mix. Plunging into the disarray of disjointed cultural associations of deep schizophonia.
John
Four arms, four legs, two heads, wood, metal and plastic; JOHN bring a unique strain of two-piece rock and roll from the capital. This duo consistently put bodies on the line with a sound that both defies and embraces their limited number, because if you’re not sweating then you’re not doing it right…
Judith Leupi
Judith Leupi mainly works with photography, exploring ideas of dimensions and scale within the frame of the picture and the intersection of the 2-dimensional plane and the 3-dimensional object. Folding parts of photographs, placing them on other images and then retaking pictures of these combinations are elements Judith uses to flatten space or create new perceptions and sort of illusions.
Using analogue photography and natural light for the sets is an important part of Judith’s practice. She is interested in the physics of things, how they are perceived in reality and how these elements can be changed in a simple way so they can transition into the imaginary, become something unusual and poetic.
Judith Leupi is part of the Artist Plinth Project, which presents new work by MFA students from Glasgow School of Art.
Karen Gwyer
Marrying drifting ambience with stern techno geometry, the US-born, London-based Gwyer has sculpted a singular and melancholic sound; the self-styled ‘bath house’ soft focus of her ‘Needs Continuum’ album – as in thrall to the kosmische of Cluster as to the clanging discords more common to Warp Records, may have given way to a more hedonistic approach, yet the ghosts in her machines linger amidst the scything beats, and the spell she cases over Braziers is destined to be a powerful one.
Katie Schwab
Katie Schwab is interested in the politics of constructing and inhabiting living space: how the building, designing, furnishing and upkeep of rooms can reveal the values, economies and politics of the people that live there. She is particularly interested in communal living situations, and how an individual voice might be found within the context of a shared living space.
Katie Schwab is part of the Artist Plinth Project, which presents new work by MFA students from Glasgow School of Art.
Kids Adventure Woodland Playground
Lose hours playing among the trees in Braziers magical woodland adventure playground.
Lady Lucy and Kayle Brandon: Drawing Exchange – Portrait Service 2060
Join Lady Lucy and Kayle Brandon to draw one anothers portraits and discuss personal and collective dream and nightmare visions of what 2060 may look like. Once the drawings are made they will be placed in a time capsule and buried. On August 9th 2060 the time capsule will be opened and the drawings will be released to fly up into the air like birds.
The Drawing Exchange is a public and social drawing platform by Kayle Brandon and Lady Lucy.
Laura Cannell & André Bosman
Laura Cannell & André Bosman perform improvised experimental fiddle music with a focus on exploring the interweaving sounds and textures of their instruments. Through the use of extended techniques, distortion, feedback and space, they create a unified and untamed music of emotive otherness.
At Supernormal the duo will give an intimate double fiddle performance.
“Distortion became wonderfully accepted by our ears. Musical gesture became somehow twisted. The folklore of violins”
Laurie Lax: Phlaag Pole Commission
Laurie Lax explores the visual and physical dynamic in-between the reality of experiencing what we understand as nature, and representations of it. In her practice the artist draws attention to the temporal reality of nature as time passes – by making the changes visually and physically tangible. Lax uses drawing as a way to look deeper into biological processes and shifts through her use of readily available materials including: pencil, paper, charcoal, chalk and silt.
Following recent Vexillology (the scientific study of flags) project at RWA, Bristol
Laurie will create a new flag for this years Phlaag Pole commission along with activities and workshops related to her practice.
Leedian
Supernormal are beyond thrilled to be welcoming Japanese sound-artist Hitoshi Asaumi, whose hallucinatory and surrealistic tapestries of electronic filigree reach for extremities and portals beyond the reach of the majority of experimental practitioners. Lovers of Autechre and Merzbow may find succour in these ethereal yet otherworldly sonics, yet the metaphysical levels Asaumi calls home should bring a particularly bracing frisson to Braziers. Leedian arrives at Supernormal courtesy of this year’s partnership with Blue Tapes with support from the Sasakawa Foundation.
Lions of Rome
Unleashed from the spectral savanna, Lions Of Rome fuse poly-rhythms with hypnotic wavescapes. Sound artists Jag Demuth and Lings Gomersall collaborate for the first time to present an intergalactic dose of spazz (space-jazz).
Lovely Lady Lumps: Alt-Femme Karaoke
The Nomadic Female DJ Troupe, who’ll be ‘popping up’ across Braziers Park throughout the weekend for live performances, workshops, and other interventionist ‘actions’, lead this karaoke session with only one rule for the music selected – gotta be by a girl*! Karaoke classics are welcome but The NF DJs would love to hear some more alternative and diverse selections of sing-a-long-able tracks by female artists and composers. Post your karaoke wish list on the Supernormal Facebook page!
*Girl = girls, women, and anyone self-identifying as female. This is an inclusive event aimed at raising the profile of the female artist/performer/composer and you don’t need to be female to sing or take part, everyone is welcome in this celebration of music by women!
Lower Slaughter
This Brightonian shower of malcontents have been going for less than a year, yet in that time word of their deranged live shows and inspired meld of full-throttle hardcore and unhinged aggression have been rife. Fronted by King Of Cats mainman Max Levy and containing Supernormal vets in their ranks, Lower Slaughter are set to show would-be iconoclasts everywhere exactly what time it is.
Manuela Barczewski
Manuela Barczewski is a German musician/composer and visual artist based in London who has been performing and recording in various musical genres over the last 10 years.
In her most recent solo-performances she has been arranging loosely structured sound loops using guitar, bass guitar, effect boards and her voice, with found lyrics taken from various music genres. Described by herself as doom and ambient, through a layering of endless sound loops and drones, multiple voices and atmospheric guitar sounds these largely improvised pieces grow into a soundscape of Lynchian allure and suspense.
Map 71
Map 71, who also arrive courtesy of this year’s partnership with Blue Tapes, is a collaboration between two Supernormal vets: Brighton based artist Lisa Jayne and drummer Andy Pyne (Kellar, Medicine & Duty, Black Neck Band of the Common Loon, West Hill Blast Quartet) who conspire make a genuinely confrontational, mind-expanding noise between the two of them. These edited improvisations – stream-of-consciousness drums, instant poetry, intuitive electronics – combine to form something akin to rage abstracted into nonsense, ferocity transmuted into poetry. Map 71 arrive at Supernormal courtesy of this year’s partnership with Blue Tapes.
Mason Chorley DJ
Brighton’s most prolific and talented lover will play records.
Mind Mountain
Surfing an interstellar wave of heavy amplification and kosmische extrapolation, Liverpool’s Mind Mountain are purveyors of a particularly potent brand of wigged-out abandon. These expansive jams forge a pathway between a particularly Patchouli-addled 1971 and a glistening Syd Mead-style futurescape, yet with clichés sidestepped at every turn.
Mono: A Printing Workshop
This Monoprinting Workshop uses paper and fabric inspired by music, art and the natural environment of the Braziers Park. Participants can create prints inspired by their Supernormal experience using found materials as well as experimenting with the printing process through intervening with drawing, marking or illustrating within the ink.
Morning Life Drawing Sessions
Morning life drawing sessions return to the beautiful sun-lit barn on Sat & Sun mornings – anyone who has been before will recall the serenity of 30 people drawing away. These informal sessions are open to all ages and abilities with help at hand and all materials provided. The sessions are led by nude portrait artist Ben Dickson with models Clair Wenger and Anthony Dunn accompanied by live music.
Morning Yoga Sessions
Early risers, come get your stretch on with the Supernormal morning Yoga sessions. Ommmmmmm.
Necro Deathmort
The sinister doom-rave of this duo lurches forth like a metaphysical force, with their barrage of circuitry and (heavy) metal noise therapy defying categorisation just as easily as it destroys braincells and re-assembles DNA. Running the gamut from monster-riffage to techno terror, Necro Deathmort are like no other experience we’re likely to have in a field before the year 2250.
Negra Branca
Marlene Ribeiro’s potent dreamscapes are both sensual and somnambulistic, lulling the listener into a blissful realm with a haunting undertow. Her work for Tesla Tapes and elsewhere has been strange and unearthly, yet subsumed by seductive melody and dubbed-out abstraction.
O YAMA O (Rie Nakajima with Keiko Yamamoto)
O YAMA O is a music project of Rie Nakajima and Keiko Yamamoto. They try to create a soundscape inspired by old Japanese folk tales, anthropology and domestic life routines etc.
“Sudden sounds and spiky gestures were enacted by Yamamoto, chanting words and stamping feet. Nakajima responded by touching her objects, prodding almost caressing them towards signs of life through sound, not unlike the role of a midwife.” – Virginia Whiles
Rie Nakajima is a Japanese artist based in the UK. She has exhibited and performed all over the world charming audiences with her inventive works of mechanical bricolage. In 2014 she received the Arts Foundation prize for Experimental Music. She co-curates the event series ‘Sculpture’ with David Toop and has collaborated with Miki Yui, David Cunningham, Phill Niblock, Pierre Berthet and many others.
OCM presents a workshop inspired by Aeolian instruments with sound artist Max Eastley
OCM presents a workshop inspired by Aeolian instruments with sound artist Max Eastley.
Max Eastley’s explorations into Aeolian instruments, from their mythology and curious history, to contemporary explorations, has energised the debate into Aeolian Phenomena. Max Eastley was a Research Fellow at the Sonic Art Research Unit at Oxford Brookes University from 2010 – 2013. Amongst many other performances, texts and installations, his explorations inspired Audible Forces, an immersive landscape of otherworldly sounds & extraordinary wind-harnessing instruments, produced by OCM and Oxford Brookes University Sonic Art Research Unit and toured throughout the UK in summer 2013.
Listen to and create an ever changing sound world at this Aeolian inspired workshop.
“Max Eastley has the knowledge and artistry to alert us to the fearsome, glorious, delicate constellation of sounds that make listening incredible” – Siobhan Davies, The Guardian
OSCILANZ
OSCILANZ is Charles Hayward (This Heat, About Group), Ralph Cumbers (Bass Clef, Some Truths) and Laura Cannell (Horses Brawl, LCAB duo). They came together in 2013 with the intention of interpreting the music of Hildegard Von Bingen, a 12th century nun and mystic, a herbalist and inventor of her own language, who was also a prolific composer of some very beautiful pieces of music. The improvisational and fragmented melodies they pursued to this end took on a life of their own and Oscilanz was born. Trombone, drums, violin, recorders, voices and electronics all blend together to produce something beguiling and uncanny. The word Oscilanz is taken from the Lingua Ignota, the language Hildegard invented, meaning ‘October’.
Paddy Steer
There are very few artists one can compare to Paddy Steer, the junkshop shaman of Manchester whose genre-eluding eccentricities and mercurial psychic tactics have rendered him the stuff of legend at home and elsewhere. Picadilly Records had this to say whilst struggling to get to grips with the bizarre majesty of his 2013 album ‘The Fortified Herd’: “Lounge, romp, deep groove, homely and galactic-expedition whimsy, furry electronic invention, it feels akin to playing and winning a computer game made from reality, to hear.” Well, quite.
Patrick Duff
A mercurial and charismatic troubadour with as many skills as a storyteller as songsmith, Patrick Duff first emerged in the ’90s as frontman of Strangelove, a band who transcended the scene they inhabited with high wire panache and spiritually-inclined intensity. One of the universe and elsewhere’s most underrated singers, he marries a potent sense of tension and dynamics with an open-hearted warmth and wry humour, taking all or any audiences he encounters on a memorable and charged trip to the brink and back.
Paul Purgas
Paul Purgas presents 909 Extrusion, an improvised performance using extreme time manipulation with the classic Roland TR909 drum machine.
Purgas’ multi-disciplinary approach knits together elements of sound and composition, architecture, industrial design and software programming which he has explored extensively across high profile artistic and curatorial oeuvre including at Whitechapel Gallery, Arnolfini, Venice Biennale, Glasgow International, Barbican Gallery, Frieze Art Fair, and Whitstable Biennial. Purgas formed Emptyset with James Ginzburg in 2005, releasing material through Raster-Noton and presenting installations and performances for Tate Britain, Kunsthalle Zurich, V&A, Sonic Acts, Bergen Konsthall and the Architecture Foundation. Purgas’ performances consider full frequency audio, psychoacoustics, and processes which drive them.
Paul Purgas is presented by Unconscious Archives, an ongoing event series which transverses noise core and vision spectacle bringing together expanded cinema and sonic propositions from London and afar.
Phantom Bstrds
Fckn Bstrds and Phantom Chips collide and explode in a massive trash-heap installation-cum-performance.
Build your own ‘noistrument’ from an array of ‘trash’ including stuff found around the site so bring along your broken umbrella or shredded poncho to make your OWN Bstrds-like creations or just come and marvel at the spectacle, hang out, talk trash, and get down with some seriously colorful waste.
Phantom Chips performs with an array of home made electronic instruments, samplers and wearable noisemakers. Concocting rhythms from manipulated found and recorded sounds Phantom Chips invites the audience to wear and play her costumes and join in with the audio. The costumes create sound through movement and allow audience members to experiment with a brand-new form of musical expression. The deliberately clumsy and awkward interfaces invite playfulness and improvisation.
Fckn Bstrds are an extended bunch of misfits from the margins of the Dutch music scene who have been intent upon molesting the senses since the late ’90s. Oft to be seen dressed up like giant trash monsters, they generate walls of feedback, noise and primal screams, like feral-fun-lunatics, side-swiping objects, participants and each other, tossing trash everywhere, and basically reducing their inhabited space to a psychedelic rainbow-colored rubbish dump.
Pin Badge Making with ILL
Join Manchester’s own punk DIYers Ill to make your own Supernormal punk DIY pin badges!
Professor Appleblossom’s Freestyle Mathematics
You will encounter Professor Appleblossom sat upon a picnic blanket armed with graph paper, calculator, compass and straightedge, a ball of string, a box of toothpicks, some blu-tack and a bag of dried beans (all the props needed to communicate higher mathematics) Stop and ask him a question if you see him (everyone’s got a maths question they want answering right?!)
Pub Quiz with Asparagus Piss Raindrop
Asparagus Piss Raindrop are a crypto conceptual science fiction anti climax band dedicated to pushing beyond all reasonable limits what live music performance can be. APR is formed from a dreadful, ever-expanding pool of performer/composer/improvisers from the Glasgow experimental music scene.
The Asparagus Piss Raindrop pub quiz will leave you single/taken/heartbroken/confused. There will be winners.
Puppet Alan Watts
Puppet Alan Watts is the first in a series of puppets created by Myra Stuart and Megan Clifton. Making fond fun of cosmic thinkers with life changing ideas and an uncanny sense of weight, Puppet Alan Watts will be giving talks to the festival audience on life and the universe at various locations throughout the weekend.
Qu Junktions DJ’s
Qu Junktions is a musical adventure operation based in Bristol, England. They tour, produce, curate and dream up ways of making musical as alive and enthralling as possible. Established in 2004 by Mark Slater and Chiz Williams, it is now a three-way collaboration between Mark Slater, John Stevens and Joe Hatt.
Qu Junktions present: Playpen
PLAYPEN is three hours of wilfully engineered chaos taking over the Supernormal Vortex: a lo-fi, hi-jinks meta-gig featuring a continuous flow of performances de/constructed in the moment and in your face.
Get in.
PLAYPEN features:
GOODIEPAL /
BLOOD MUSIC /
TRASH KIT /
NEIL CAMPBELL WITH THE SUPERNORMAL VORTEX GREEN DREAM ORCHESTRA & MASSED ASTRAL CHOIR /
SILVER WAVES /
MCCLOUD ZICMUSE /
AUTOBITCH /
DAGGER BROTHERS /
SPECTRES /
AMBER AUDIO /
BLOOD SPORT /
KLEIN
Qu Junktions is a musical adventure operation based in Bristol, England. They tour, produce, curate and dream up ways of making music as alive and enthralling as possible. Established in 2004 by Mark Slater and Chiz Williams, it is now a three-way collaboration between Mark Slater, John Stevens and Joe Hatt.
Rachel Gomme: Tail-bearer
A strange creature, half-human, half-fantasy, roams the woods and hunkers in cobwebbed corners, emerging from a tangle of natural substance and artificial matter. Over the Supernormal weekend, Rachel will be knitting herself a tail, using materials ranging from yarn to wire, cassette tape and electrical cable, to bindweed and brambles. As she wanders the space knitting, adding to the extension attached to her own body, viewers are invited to contribute materials, to knit part of the tail themselves, and to offer tales of tailed creatures from fantasy or reality.
Rachel Gomme works in performance and installation. Her practice spans durational performance, site-specific performance and one-to-one interactions, as well as video, sound and sculptural installations, but is rooted in the live presence. Her work aims to open a space for engagement with the embodied moment, and awareness of time and memory held in the body. She explores absence, silence, and the neglected and overlooked spaces of urban life. She has presented work, performed and taught throughout the UK and internationally.
Rhodri Davies
Experimental harpist Rhodri Davies takes his instrument far from the angelic tool of legend, and in the direction of the abstract, not to mention zones of nightmares as well as dreamstates. A wide variety of projects have seen him expand the boundaries of contemporary folk music just as he does with his instrument, and crafting textures beyond the reach of the everyday.
Richard Skelton and Autumn Richardson
Richard Skelton and Autumn Richardson present a new film comprising video, text and music following their recent retrospective Memorious Earth at Abbot Hall, in Cumbria. The film will be screened in the study in Braziers House.
Multi-instrumentalist Richard Skelton draws on memory and landscape to create compositions that layer bowed strings and field recordings. Much of his work is in collaboration with his wife, Canadian poet and musician Autumn Richardson, and is released under the name *AR, on Corbel Stone Press. Skelton and Richardson run the press from their home in Broughton Mills, Cumbria, releasing recordings, books, pamphlets and prints. They publish audio recordings, texts and art – specialising in handmade editions using environmentally friendly materials wherever possible. Their particular areas of interest are landscape, the poetics of place, ecology, folklore and animism.
There will be a selection of Corbel Stone Press releases available in the Supernormal merch tent.
Rodrigo Red
Rodrigo Red investigates the ways in which humans devise systems and institutions in order to construct and control social reality. The roles of spatial structures (e.g. architecture) and of communication structures (e.g. language, the image, etc.), within this overall process of construction he combines sculpture, architectural installations and photography. aiming to generate both perceptual and phenomenological responses within observers as well as aspiring to awaken the sense of our physical space and the role it plays as a catalyst for personal and narrative response.
Rodrigo Red is part of the Artist Plinth Project, which presents new work by MFA students from Glasgow School of Art.
Rummage
Rummaging has become an obsession for Henry Collins and Robin Foster over the last two years. The sound of multifarious junk objects knocking and falling into each other and the physicality and meditative benefits of the activity has seen them rummaging many nights away in search of interesting new rhythms, through testing combinations of objects and vessels, experimenting, recording, forming larger ensembles of rummagers and looking to become virtuoso rummagers (if such a thing is possible).
rum·mage (rmj)
v. rum·maged, rum·mag·ing, rum·mag·es
v.tr.
1. To search thoroughly by handling, turning over, or disarranging the contents of.
2. To discover by searching thoroughly.
v.intr.
To make an energetic, usually hasty search.
n.
1. A thorough search among a number of things.
2. A confusion of miscellaneous articles.
Safehouse Open Improv Session
Safehouse is a long-running improvisation night based in Brighton. Participants are picked at random forming small groups, and they then improvise together for 10 minutes or so while the remaining musicians act as audience, then the next group is formed and so on.
This year, Safehouse are coming to Supernormal and inviting you to perform in the barn at Braziers Park. Participation is open to all festival-goers, so pack your instrument (or whatever you choose to improvise on) if you think you might be keen to take part.
Sam Cook
Sam Cook was born in Exeter Devon in 1988. He studied Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art, London but soon became bored and deflated by the city and the on-going brutal and rapid gentrification of important cultural communities. He moved to Glasgow in 2014 in order to pursue an MFA at Glasgow school of Art. He has since been brewing beer at his Pollokshields flat, cooking and sharing food amongst friends and neighbours and dragging unwanted matter across the city.
‘I find it difficult to verbalise the complex relationship that exists between my concerns as an artist, and my ethical perspectives as a semi-rational human being. Perhaps now I can recognise that this has something to do with the semantics concerning the ‘C’ word and the ‘S’ word. Of course I am referring to (in a hushed whisper) community and sustainability. These two words seem to carry with them so much stigma and gravitas, that in turn have become abstract and nebulous. In a search for cohesion within my own practice, I have become more interested in synthesising the two, recognising that social sustainability is in-fact inextricably linked to its environmental brother’.
Sam Cook is part of the Artist Plinth Project, which presents new work by MFA students from Glasgow School of Art.
Shape Note Singing Workshop
This Sacred Harp singing workshop teaches people the basics of shape note singing – a simplified musical notation system designed to make it easy for non-musicians to learn to sing in harmony. By the end of the workshop, they guarantee that everyone will be able to sing in full-throated harmony. Ever been told you can’t sing? This is the workshop for you!
Sharon Gal: A/V Performance
Sharon Gal’s list of accompishments is too long for this section of the website-the experimental vocalist and artistic catalyst has performed with the likes of David Toop, Steve Noble, Andie Brown, Edwin Pouncey, Steve Beresford and Phil Minton, has released albums on a number of fine labels, had a hand in the formation of Resonance FM and has worked on innumerable projects around the world. She’ll be bringing both a solo vocal performance and a workshop-based piece to Supernormal, in the process sharing her unique métier with the assembled.
Silent Films
Round out your weekend in the Vortex with a selection of weird and wonderful silent-era films for your post-midnight viewing pleasure.
Snapped Ankles
Frequently costume-clad and always psychically disorientating, Snapped Ankles bring a krautrock-derived groove momentum, radiophonic DIY trickery and a maverick sense of the absurd to play in the pursuit of rapture, madness or both. They’ll be gracing the Vortex will a brand new Audio-Visual piece, sure to be as brow-furrowing and eyebrow-singing as everything this mysterious metropolitan troupe turn their hands to.
Soft Bombs: Make your own Charcoal Bombs
Laurie Lax explores the visual and physical dynamic between the reality of experiencing nature and representations of it. Her work often draws attention to the temporal reality of nature as time passes – by making the changes visually and physically tangible. Lax uses drawing in a broad sense with raw materials like pencil, paper, charcoal, chalk and silt. Soft Bombs are a prop Laurie invented for a recent video project during her residency in Lithuania.
For her Soft Bomb workshop, Laurie will teach audiences how to make their own charcoal ‘Soft Bombs’ which will then be ‘launched’ at a white canvas where the impact will create a new artwork.
SPACE FAMILY ROBO-DISCO with John Doran
The Quietus’ resident renaissance man and wheels-of-steel expert John Doran presents the SPACE FAMILY ROBO-DISCO, in which he invites adults and children alike on an afternoon flight to Venus, via interstellar and time-travelling tune age for those from 6 to 666 from Michael Jackson to Donna Summer to Mororder to Cerrone. Fun for all ages in zero gravity!
Spectres
Levelling punk rock insouciance up against a glorious blur of opiated guitar drone, Bristol’s Spectres make a racket that transcends past and present by attitude alone. Their killer debut ‘Dying’ – all abject art and small-hours abandon – is testimony to a band whose ire seems unlikely to be extinguished.
Stargazer’s Assistant
Stargazer’s Assistant is the solo project of Guapo drummer David Smith, in which he and various collaborators (including members of Cyclobe) explore dreamlike states and otherworldly ambience.
“Eyes closed, ears wide open, we are given freedom to dream the void. Sweeping, intricate, sometimes ominous yet always exuding a warmth and depth of emotion, The Stargazer’s Assistant produces pure cinema of sound”
Stasis 73: Broken Glass
Broken Glass : a sound and video sculptural installation with live performance of 30 minutes duration, features multiple projections of fractional reflections from broken mir-rors, original & sourced spoken word, location recordings interwoven with drones and electro-acoustic manipulated pure noise, voice, text, whisperings, & darkness, evoking an immersive atmosphere simultaneously reflective, intriguing & edgy.
Stasis73 are a collective of film makers, painters, poets and musicians living & working on the south coast, that formed in 2009 and explore through installation, film & live per-formance the place where visual & sonic assume equal weight. Their sound & visual performances evoke an atmosphere simultaneously oppressive, uplifting, nostalgic and intriguing. Interwoven footage, photographs, images, location recordings, drones, ma-nipulated noise, voice, text, whisperings & darkness, obscured feelings, layered arti-facts, elegiac and melancholic, stark yet hopeful.
Stephen Cornford: CRT Quartet
Stephen Cornford’s work stems from a fascination with consumer electronics and the human relationship with technology. This manifests itself in the CRY Quartet as a performance for four CRT televisions. As Stephen himself states, ‘Four related audio signals are sent to the video inputs of the monitors which display a visual interpretation of the waveform. Each screen is then amplified with an induction coil allowing us to hear the electromagnetic radiation from the screen and the interference produced by the audio signal’ This relates to a desire of his to create situations in which the material; whether solid, spatial or sonic, controls the outcome as much as he does himself.
Sturle Dagsland
Sturle Dagsland walks a path entirely his own, one in which primal intensity collides with ethereal atmosphere in a manner that can summon awe and abandon in equal measure. One might say his music resembles what a dweller of a mystical rural realm might make, were they banished to Norway with nothing but Boredoms, Björk and Residents albums for company. Yet even this sounds flippant and reductive when confronted with this fella’s almighty, and strangely sensitive sturm-und-drang.
“An adventurous spirit, a unique sound and an irrefutable intensity… The music has a primitive and ethereal feeling. It’s dark, disruptive, astonishing and groundbreaking…They cannot be categorized, because they sound like nothing that already exist”
Super Sensory Sandpit
The Supernormal Super Sensory Summer School (SSSSS) create an on-site sandpit:A place for all ages to play, explore and collaborate or simply relax and indulge your senses.Bring what you can find from the Supernormal site to add to this open to all spontaneous creative project in the spirit of Woodcraft Chivalry spanning the duration of the weekend.’
Supersonic DJ
The other ‘Super’ festival join us to share some super-aural delights from their magic box of treats.
Supersonic Kids Gig with Woven Skull
Ever since Schoenberg and Kandinsky became pen pals back in 1907, avant-garde art and experimental music has been attempting to find some common ground. But, it’s not been easy. Here’s Capsule’s contribution towards a solution: Supersonic Kids Gigs ‘Big Sounds for Little People’. If you couldn’t guess from the snappy title, it’s a gig for kids and their families, which aims to introduce children to experimental music at an early age. Kids Gigs provide a fantastic opportunity to show children the beauty of live music.
Leading the Supersonic Kids Gig are Woven Skull, The trio spent several years experimenting with combinations of instrumentation, household objects, kitchen utensils, seashells, footsteps, chimes, recordings of cats purring and frogs mating while developing a sound that after a recent set was described as ‘a Turkish Velvet Underground.’
Surreal Skin Decorator
This is not face painting as you know it. There will be no butterflies, tigers or ‘pretty’ there is no time frame just the twilight zone of 4 dimensional skin art. Surreal disco skin decorator Natalie Sharp invites you to spin the wheel of (mis)fortune to discover your antipodean character – from monochrome galaxy to psychedelic amphibian from outer to inner space.
Talkaoke
Come and join the UFO of chat with Talkaoke – a spontaneous, pop-up talk-show set around the unique ‘Talkaoke Table’. You set the agenda for discussion so here’s your chance to set the debate! Supernormal organisers will be joining in so come along and meet the team!
Talkaoke is presented by The People Speak.
Ten Benson
In their earliest mysterious incarnation, this dishevelled and degenerate troupe set their stall out as ‘psychedelic hillbillies’ and purveyors of a brawny, gloriously brand of Beedfheartian blues trash. Yet it didn’t take long before their rock monster tendencies swept them to amps-on-eleven glory aplenty, as evil-obsessed absurdist anthems like ‘Rock Cottage’a and ‘Robot Tourist’ married fuzzed-out raunch, furrowed brows and raised goat-signs in an overload of unreconstructed glory. After a lengthy break, the Benson are back, and frankly we can’t wait for them to be under their heavy riffage.
Tenebrous Liar
Formed by fabled photographer Steve Gullick, Tenebrous Liar are purveyors of a particularly brawny stripe of rock; the stuff of blackening skies and overcranked amp stacks in dark basements. A band possessed with the unique alchemical power to make feeling bad feel good, these Lynchian deadbeat serenades ring with a potency that will have little trouble enveloping even this tree-lined glade.
The Bare Plume Cafe and Wish You’d Been Here Bar
Artist collectives Bare Plume and Wish you’d been here will team up to create an environment in which you can refuel on exciting ethical food, indulge in pick-me-up cocktails and engage in discussion – and perhaps debate – on notions of hosting, hospitality and the critical and radical value of having a good time with others.
Bare Plume, a collective based in Bradford who organise music and art events in DIY spaces, have been ‘indulging senses on a shoestring’ with their mix of underground entertainment, mind-bending cocktails and cruelty-free-but-not-boring food since 2013. Bare Plume’s BBQ Jackfruit butties and Espresso Martinis have been the sustenance to many a banging party at events including food festivals, gallery openings, club nights and most recently Bradford Threadfest.
Wish you’d been here is a project led by artists and curators Andrea Francke and Eva Rowson that began in January 2014 as a way to bring together and explore histories and current thoughts of hosting, socialising and partying as a new framework to reflect on contemporary art practices that involve working with people.
Members of both groups have worked together on collaborative events and in other guises including Black Dogs, Art In Unusual Spaces, 38b and events at Open School East and Tate Modern where they built a pub in the Turbine Hall as a place for discussion about recuperation and co-optation of independent art activity.
The Barefoot Howlers – Get in the back of the van!
The Barefoot Howlers perform acapella music like no other with male and female voices gathering and rising. Part tongue-in-cheek divination, part sincere serenade, the Barefoot Howlers create an interactive otherworldly,polyphonic ritualistic performance somewhere in the field at Supernormal. Keep an eye out for a shady looking van and they won’t be far away!
The Democratic Band of The Democratic Republic of Free People(s)
What is to be done? We who are still alive, living in the often fibrilating heartland of a senescent capitalism – can we do more than reflect on the decay around and within us? Can we do more than sing our sad and bitter songs of disillusion and defeat?
Few manuscripts of The Democratic Republic of Free People(s) today are forgivable. Black on the canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet of paper, are perhaps feasible. There is little conjuction of Freedom and social ‘Democracy’. Around us are pseudo-events, to which we adjust with a false Freedom adapted to see these events as true and Democratic, and even as beautiful. In The Democratic Republic of Free People the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled Freedom, and beauty is almost no longer possible.
The Democratic Republic of Free People(s) leave their island to bring their newly formed ‘band’ to Supernormal to promulgate their missive to the people.
The Lords Of Thyme
Formed when ex-Circulus members Joe Woolley, Tali Trow and Pat Kenneally teamed up with vocalist Michelle Griffiths. Lords Of Thyme are a product of a love for folk, progressive and psychedelic shapes. Fabulously bucolic, earthy and refreshingly unadorned, their mystical serenades hark back not only to the glories of The Incredible String Band and Pentangle, but right back to the 13th century.
The Nomadic Female DJ Troupe
The Nomadic Female DJ Troupe are Francine Perry, Lisa Busby and Ruthie Woodward who converge as a roaming collective through the shared use of found, sonic materials within their work. They will be ‘popping up’ across Braziers Park throughout the weekend for live performances, workshops, and other interventionist ‘actions’. In the spirit of inspiring feminist traditions of the second and third wave, this intervention will be fluid and pluri-vocal allowing room for anyone to join them at any time.
The Supernormal Super-Sensory Summer School
The Supernormal Super Sensory Summer School (SSSSS) will run workshops that think through, recreate and reimagine the history, prehistory and possible futures of Braziers Park School of Integrative Social Research. It will simultaneously be the process of working out how to make a video about this, that could be repurposed for a promotional video for the i.u. – Braziers’ new and so far speculative educational programme.
The workshops will be presentations followed by open round-table sensory discussions that will determine what will happen in the outdoor space of the festival in the SSSSS sandpit. They will travel through time, weaving through Braziers’ themes of evolution, ecology and pacifism, in a form something like this:
Saturday: The Order as a Social Organism (1914 – 1947)
WW1 (Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War) The “Haifa” Society
OWC – Order of Woodcraft Chivalry, Folkmoots, Kibbo Kift and Woodcraft Folk Summer Camps, Social Credit Movement and the Greenshirts
Friends of the Future (1947 – 1964)
Common Wealth Sensory Summer Schools (see attached PDF 2)
Braziers Park School of Integrative Social Research
Project Sigma and the Anti-U
Sunday: Continuing the Evolution (1982 – 2015)
Triangle Network
Braziers International Artists Workshop
Supernormal
i.u.
Prospective Reading List
Dorothy Revel Cheiron’s Cave-the School of the Future: An Educational Synthesis Based on the New Psychology (1928)
Norman Glaister Why Sensory? An Essay in Vital Democracy (1945)
L.L.Whyte The Next Development in Man (1947)
“The present world situation must be regarded not merely as a great crisis of Europe or of our civilisation, but also as an upheaval such as has only appeared three or four times in the history of this planet – a development in evolution. As atoms had joined to form cells, and cells to form bodies and bodies had developed by stages into mankind, so now there was a trend towards the linking of human minds. Modern psychology divided minds into two classes, resistive and adaptive; if these two classes
could be linked, they would together cover the whole field of life.”
“Our Struggle”, The Hornsey Journal (1942)
SSSSS organisers:
John Cussans: snaking through the archive, following occult, sci-fi and cosmic evolutionary cosmology threads.
Chris Hind: organising the outside creative stuff, play and sandpits, with an interest in Olaf Stapledon’s sci-fi Sirius about the life of a super-intelligent talking thinking dog and how he perceives the world primarily through the sense of smell.
Charlie Fox: performance, sound and sand pits, improvising with the sensory and whatever occurs.
Anne Robinson: researching the religious and occult leanings of the various organisations and their key players’ and where this intersects with the political aspects of ‘anti-university’.
Lendl Barcelos: will set some games and instructions from afar; post-production, sound and film editing, in executive mode.
Stephanie Moran: research around the history of the different organizations that led up to the founding of the BPSISR (Braziers Park School of Integrative Social Research) in 1950, from the point of view of organizational structures and their relationship to group / community and ideals and the religious and occult leanings of the various organisations and their key players.
Trash Kit
A riot of polyrhythmic interplay and melodic abandon, Trash Kit are a potent force in the London DIY underground, and their Technicolor assault reached a pinnacle on 2014’s ‘Confidence’, whose wiry and vibrant stylings are beamed in from a place equal parts pop suss and intuitive aplomb. We’re really just amazed it’s taken us this long to get around to getting ’em along.
Trembling Bells
Carrying the traditions of ’70s folk luminaries into the present day via both an improvised sensibility and a more amplified approach, Trembling Bells render the classicist eternal with affection and inspiration. There may be Incredible String Band whimsy to be had here, yet its filtered through a psychedelic prism that can’t help but be stirring and satisfying to ear and heart alike.
Trummor & Orgel
Hailing from Sweden, this Hammond-organ-and-drums duo craft expansive instrumental extrapolations that hark back to the late-’60s yet remain at all times boundlessly optimistic and free in spirit. Always melodious yet driven by tightly wound improvisatory interplay between the duo, their serenades unite the freak-out with the bliss-out in uplifting style.
Uesung Lee
Uesung’s work analyses and reinterprets human ways of adaptation and interaction between individuals within their socio-ecological environment. His work questions how unconscious human behavior, thoughts, habits and way of life originally evolved. It represents the causes and effects of adaptation, through the innately acquired characteristics of human beings in relation to labour and the dominant-subordinate structures of society.
Uesung Lee is part of the Artist Plinth Project, which presents new work by MFA students from Glasgow School of Art.
Unconscious Archives
Unconscious Archives is an ongoing event series which transverses noise core and vision spectacle bringing together expanded cinema and sonic propositions from London and afar.
For Supernormal 2015 Unconscious Archives present a programme of channeled alchemical performances and sonorous exploratives from Gnar Hest, Vicky Langan, and Paul Purgas.
Vicky Langan
Vicky Langan brings to the forefront primal emotions, corporeal actions, and charged audiovisual surfacings.
Wölflinge, her solo project, makes use of flesh, fluid and self built instruments.
Her work in the field of sound has earned her the title of ‘Queen-Bee of Irish Noise’. She has performed widely, both solo and in collaboration with Paul Hegarty (La Société des Amis du Crime), Meitheal (with David Colohan and Mike Gangloff), Raising Holy Sparks, Agitated Radio Pilot, United Bible Studies, the Quiet Club, and recently she has been collaborating with experimental filmmaker Maximilian Le Cain in a series of videos. As a curator and promoter she is best known for Black Sun, her regular weirdo/outer limits music night, through which she invited renowned makers of strange sounds from around the world to play for the first time in Ireland. Langan co-organises the Avant, an annual festival for Contemporary Arts in Cork, Ireland.
Vicky Langan is presented by Unconscious Archives, an ongoing event series which transverses noise core and vision spectacle bringing together expanded cinema and sonic propositions from London and afar.
Vocalise Performance
Following Sharon Gals ‘Vocalise’ workshop, come along to witness a performance created by it’s participants.
Vocalise Workshop with Sharon Gal
Singer or not, anyone can find inner pleasure by vocalising.
Join this playful and practical workshop, to explore your voice in a friendly group setting, and develop a new, collaborative composition / performance. The workshop will include experimenting with various methods of breathing and developing awareness of posture and movement. Discovering the range and potential of your voice and connecting it with others. Practicing vocal improvisation and extended techniques, to discover the collective sound of the group. We will develop a collaborative piece between 12-3pm Sunday in the Barn, returning at 3.30pm to perform it to an audience.
Vocalise is suitable for newcomers; singers and non-singers.
Volunteer Opera
Along with a vocal performance, vocalist and artist Jennifer Walshe will run a workshop to create a volunteer opera. Anyone with any level of musical experience (including non-existent) can participate. Come dressed in your most flambuoyant finery. Your voice will be warmed up and you’ll be given text to sing/shout/scream/whimper as well as actions to carry out. The whole shebang will be filmed to create the “SUPERNORMAL VOLUNTEER OPERA”.
Wenonoah
Bristol-based songsmith and surfer of synaptic disruption Rosena Wenonoah terms her own style ‘Fine Flesh Pop for Abstracted Humans’, and it’s indeed hard to think of another psychic seer we’ve come across so expert at balancing out melodic nous and startling innovation, creating chart hits for an extra-terrestrial 24th century world in the process. Nonetheless, at Supernormal 2015 she’ll be bringing her stark, affecting and potent approach to the piano in Braziers House for what’s sure to be an unforgettable extension through dimensions.
Wild Bunch DJ’s
Wild Bunch Club is a club for everyone, run by people with learning difficulties – so far they’ve rocked the house at nearly every Supernormal so we’re thrilled to have them celebrate our 6th festival. Expect DJ’s donning da ranks to destroy the place in the poppiest/danciest style possible.
Wire DJ’s
Expect some adventures in sound and music and a wide range of alternative, underground and non-mainstream musics from the folks at Wire.
Woven Skull
Woven Skull hail from the sparse Irish countryside, and their atmospheric surroundings have helped to forge a sound that has been described as both ‘minimal, repetitive, distorted, ugly and beautiful in one’ and ‘a Turkish Velvet Underground’. Cyclical rhythms, drone-based mantras the eerie creaks and haunted cries of the natural realm that surround them converge to form a dark and beguiling ritual magick.
WTVR
‘8-Bit Grunge’ psychonauts WTVR’s gnarly yet effervescently melodious ditties take a garage-rock aesthetic and plunge it screaming into the future, as barbed accordion, noise-rock flourishes, shredding guitar and insouciant attitude coalesce in gloriously bratty style.
¡hen~dØ āudio vįsual sołuti0ns
¡hen~dØ āudio vįsual sołuti0ns ask more answers than questions. They and you will dissolve into one another on finding the solution – or if it finds “you”. Wandering on site and in sight they are a predominately a pleasing shade of orange, though also emit a variety of other frequencies appropriating space and surface during their spontaneous audio-visual cutup interventions.