a few words on the supersonic festival in birmingham last weekend (warning: contains references to loud things):
friday!
taking the only affordable train from glasgow to birmingham meant getting up at 6 AM and spending an entire day exploring birmingham's limited pleasures, including some really disappointing record shops. bah. my hotel mates arrived later in the day, at which point we discovered that our three-person room was beyond tiny and necessitated a certain amount of consensual spooning.
anyway, to the fest!
friday night kicked off with monarch - entirely new to me, but really quite something. their set consisted of one long khanate-esque sparse uber-doom onslaught that gradually increased in intensity and complexity. their vocalist, emilie, was something of a one-track screamer, but what a screamer. half the time she didn't even use the mic, and yet was virtually as loud without it. good set. really heavy, really physical, really engrossing. I'd definitely catch these guys again.
tried to see bela emerson, but the kitchen bar was really tiny, so entry was impossible. it was fairly well soundproofed too, and bela's delicate meanderings didn't cut through outside at all.
did manage to get in for fuck buttons though. heard the name, never actually heard anything by them. as they took the stage with laptops and toy instruments and day-glo nu-rave wear I began to feel hostile. this was going to be really shit and incredibly annoying. I steeled myself for the familiar taste of bile in my throat. ahhh, what a pleasure to be wrong. they were totally great. started off with really sweet tinkling melodies that escalated into throbbing heavy metal synth dirges and frenetic vocalisations. one of the guys dragged a drum into the audience, right by me, and beat out a stick-clicking marching-band rhythm, his sticks flicking dangerously close to my nethers.
at this point, I decided, yeah, fuck buttons are pretty damn good, much, much better than their name and image suggest. but halfway through their set I decided to venture out of the kitchen to catch a bit of local confrontational metal types deadsunrising. what a mistake! godawful cliched post-metal drear abounds. couldn't get back into FB. stood in the adjacent cafe, watching them through the tiny windows and feeling slightly sick at the sight of people repeatedly dipping half-eaten samosas into the communal chilli sauce bowl.
headed back over to the medicine bar for kling klang, whose prog-kraut-synth-metal stylings initially grated but soon became essential and massively addictive. really great stuff. the main guitarist/synthist has an amazing array of metal gurning powers too.
the kitchen by this point was a packed sweatbox, and there was no way I was forcing my way in there to see kid 606. so I took my place for wolf eyes. wasn't there for long. for one thing, the incredibly drunk guy behind me was on the verge of puking down my back. for another, wolf eyes were vile, and not in a good way. this was my third WE experience. the first was truly awesome, the second slightly fun but slightly dismal, but now...I think I may hate them. the relentless, pointless fist-pumping just annoyed me intensely. it's not visceral enough to be exciting, there's not a single decent idea in there, there's just nothing but an extended manowar intro overlaid with sub-generic noise. I still think these guys make decent records, but the live show is becoming a truly moronic pastiche. bloody terrible.
although not quite as bad as otto von schirach. top marks for superhero costume, no marks for wacky, inoffensive and cheap-sounding digital splattercore. and minus marks for sub-marilyn manson cover of 'when doves cry'.
saturday!
pre-fest diversions of reading the weather at BBC birmingham's interactive centre, a fantastic paula rego exhibition, a collection of great stuff from david shrigley, gilbert and george, bridget reilly and more at the modern art gallery, superb pie and mash, and a pint of guinness at the local gay bar...
the main event got off to an amazing start with shit & shine. six drummers, two bassists, one vocalist. inredible, ecstatic dogged riff-repetition, like a single-minded boredoms stuck in a run-out groove. absolutely amazing stuff, and some of the players were clearly having the greatest time of their lives. frankly, I would almost have been happy if the whole festival was just eight hours of these guys. just stunning.
was chatting to some folks outside the packed and impenetrable voice of the seven woods, but from what I could hear they sounded pretty intriguing in an eastern european folk meets big post-rock kind of way.
was gabbing away in the kitchen bar while shady bard were plying their despicable and unwelcome coldplayisms, then headed off to see miasma and the carousel of headless horses. probably the best that I've seen these guys, all slinky fairground folk, intricate prog eccentricity, heavy passages and massive bass. slightly distracting to have the latter half of the wicker man playing on the screens, but it does kind of fit in with their oeuvre...
only saw the first track of pharoah overlord. great, great stuff though. wish I could've stuck around. amazing leather and studs krauty metal, about as subtle as a pineapple up the arse. however, I had to get down the front for oxbow.
this was my highlight...eugene on fine form, drooling and howling and thrusting his crotch in the collective face of the front row, niko playing a vicious acoustic. although it's pure performance, this is genuinely dangerous, edgy stuff, both musically and physically. it's devastating mental breakdown made (massive) flesh before your very eyes. at the end, the duo, already augmented by a cellist who may or may not have been from crippled black phoenix, were joined by stephen o'malley, pita from KTL and justin broadrick to play a new and explicitly threatening track that became subsumed in thick black drone. astonishing.
made it outside, dazed, confused and therefore in an appropriate mental state for chrome hoof. this could have just been very silly. about 45 people in the band, all dressed in silver, complete with girl engaged in ridiculous I-am-a-space-robot dancing. pure novelty, excpet for the fact that the music was amazing...disco prog metal with more than a hint of sun ra about it. the only band of the weekend to get me dancing like a total tit, completely against my will. oh, and the only band to have a 15-foot spacegoat monster thing come on and dance too.
defying the laws of time and space, I managed to see most of OM. pretty great...relentless stoner riffery, but more complex and nuanced than I'd expected. essentially a constant bass drone with extemporisations, overlaid with astonishing drumming and mantra vocals. not exactly immediate, but soon sucked me in to its grimy, swirly depths.
mogwai, then. it's been a few years since I've seen them, but I do love this band. however, they were a bit flat. an odd, subdued choice of setlist that left you constantly hoping for a 'fear satan' or 'like herod' or 'xmas steps' or 'my father'...something BIG, something transcendent. ('glasgow mega snake' did sound incredible though). to be honest if this was the first time I'd seen them, I'd think it was pretty damn good. they're super-tight and most of it is beauitful stuff, but knowing that they're capable of scaling far greater heights meant that I was deflated and unsatisfied.
finally, sunn o))). by this point I was dead on my feet. not sure how much I saw or missed of their set. I arrived after they started, sat down to take it in, dozed off and woke up before they finished. and I couldn't see a thing as the stage was entirely obscured by smoke, both from the stage and the audience. nonetheless, it was clear that this was a particularly intense perfomance even by their standards - a dense, sticky, destructive, evil force. something very HP lovecraft about the whole thing. pretty astonishing stuff, the kind of physically immersive sound you can never capture on record.
a bit of a middling friday, though more than compensated for by saturday's abundant brilliance. and it speaks volumes that I rarely gave a thought to the unfortunate cancellations of zeni geva and harvey milk.