Supersonic Festival live review

Supersonic Festival
Birmingham
30th-31st August 2024

Wam Bam Birmingham! The most cutting of cutting edge festivals returns for its annual celebration of the eclectic and a typically stunning bill of music that keeps you both intrigued and guessing.

There is something perfect about the Supersonic Festival and its place at the heart of Birmingham’s music culture. The city that doesn’t celebrate itself has a real jewel in its jewellery quarter crown here and the Festival, in its 21st year, somehow unpackages an outlooking vision of the third biggest city in the UK. Starting with Black Sabbath, it’s created a groundbreaking musical monolith, ending up with stages full of a glorious worldwide parade of imagination paying homage to the possibilities of sound, from dark weird folk, electronic shapeshifting and Morris dancers as well as drone and metal tangents.

Wherever you wander in the clutch of venues in the re-energised back streets of Digbeth, where former garages and factories have been turned into cool venues and bars, there is something going on.

I can only get there on the Sunday this year but instantly wander into a room captivated by Mary Lattimore and her harp. There has been a resurgence in this ancient instrument recently, but Mary takes it somewhere else. There are elements of drone and psychedelia to the plucked notes that resonate as they glide around the room, with some pedal board magic and dub effects adding to to the ancient pluckery. A clue to her vision is that she has performed with indie musicians that include Thurston Moore, Kurt Vile, and Steve Gunn, and she brings the harp to that mind-melting sonic space. She weaves a magical spell and transports this most traditional of instruments into the now, which is some feat.

Upstairs, the folk from Weird Walk have transformed the rooftop bar, erecting ‘standing stones’ and creating space for ‘re-enchantment, music and merriment to thrive in a cool space’ that somehow finds a lineage from the neolithic to the now. There is Jacken  Elswyth entwining the traditional and the cosmic whilst playing a cosmic ambient banjo, before Boss Morris takes the ad hoc stage, bringing a neat twist on Morris dancing, reconnecting it to its pagan Moorish roots with a ‘ribald colour and devilish storytelling’. The cosmic dancing female collective makes sure that Morris dancing is no longer the realm of real ale folkie Seventies school teachers, and part of an ancient storytelling that resonates to the now. 

The main event today is, of course, Øxn – the offshoot or side project from Lankum. They move on from the mothership Lankum’s experimental doom folk into a harmonious dark energy, with Radie Peat and Katie Kim’s hypnotic David Lynchian off-kilter flickering harmonies entwined around two members of Percolator (John ‘Spud’ Murphy and Eleanor Myler)’s sparse rhythms and soundscapes.  

In the same way that Wardruna brought brooding Norwegian Viking era folk musics into the now, Øxn have done the same for Irish roots. They reconnect into the green and ghostly past and take the harmonies and the darkness up another level and haunting tier.

Their first gig was last October, and they are already a perfect conduit for another ancient yet modern music that is spellbinding in its atmospherics and emotional melody, which sees a swelling of the heart with each chord change. The harmonies between Radie Peat and Katie Kim’s vocals are beautiful in their intoxicating atmospheres and sound. They are truly special as they blend their voices into new terrain, and the sparse drums and droning, almost Nico-like harmonium and electronics add to the sense of sparse terrain and sonic beauty. 

It’s a perfect summation of the platform that Supersonic provides – that linking of the ancient and the modern and making sense of the now with the past. 

Birmingham is lucky to have such a visionary festival in its portfolio.

~

All words by John Robb.

Photos as indicated.