After a summer of unimaginative corporate festivals sponsored by crypto companies, Supersonic couldn’t come at a better moment. Rather than jamming punters into a field, slapping halloumi stands between brand “activation” stalls and calling it culture, the care and community at this independent festival of outer-reaches sounds is evident in every single detail as it celebrates its 20th anniversary. There are the handpainted signs of an eyeball dripping blood, a logo that comes to feel extremely prescient as delirious volume threatens to rearrange one’s internal organs; the fresh £1 samosas, as bracingly spicy as much of the music and perfect for soaking up an excess of farmyard-strength cider; thoughtful panel discussions on whether DIY music events can constitute temporary utopias.
Most striking is the very human sense of how fans experience a festival like this, with the lineup building to a crescendo of apocalyptic noise on Saturday night before a gentle comedown on Sunday featuring a yoga class set to doom music, a very silly pub quiz (it comes down to a tiebreaker revealing that 2,100 samosas are consumed at each instalment) and a (comparatively) softer, folkier conclusion. That care is repaid in the sense of an ardently appreciative Supersonic family: the musicians frequently shout out founder Lisa Meyer and the almost comic preponderance of T-shirts bearing the logos of drone heroes Sunn O))) (who aren’t even playing) and cult outdoors zine Weird Walk suggest a strong common bond amid an underserved audience. (Though the best T-shirt simply reads: “unlistenable”.)
And given the well-documented challenges of running events like this – especially in the UK, where arts funding is scarce compared with what European counterparts such as Le Guess Who? or Rewire receive – the staunch support from the 1,000-strong crowd for these left-field acts feels even more profound, especially as each of the festival’s two rooms is almost always jammed for both noise icons and burgeoning experimentalists. If Friday has a loose theme, it might be polyrhythms: it opens with Liverpool quartet Ex-Easter Island Head, who pummel and strafe guitars with mallets and violin bows, producing hypnotic undulations that they disturb with churning drones and math-rock stabs. On one song, a musician tickles a xylophone to make it sparkle as intricately as a kalimba.
Alt-rock stalwarts Deerhoof are practically the star name equivalent of Dua Lipa at an event like this, and they tease with tension and release, their clenched, kaleidoscopic, clarion playing blown apart by Greg Saunier’s shaggy yet sharp drumming. Guitarist Ed Rodriguez subverts everything from classic rock to lilting Hawaiian music, and hypnotises with tight, interlocking parts that inch towards the infinite like the repeating Greek meander pattern. Taps-aff duo Giant Swan, however, stick a little closer to monorhythm, blitzing the crowd with a level of distortion and aggression that comes to feel almost psychedelic. Baltimore rap experimentalists Infinity Knives are just as unrelenting, leaving not a wisp of air in their furiously packed bars.
The intensity turns out to be a great primer for Saturday, which ratchets the heaviness to mindbending levels. Experimental band Horse Lords, also from Baltimore, offer a softer start, latticing their guitars, sax and drums into an invigorating fractal undertow that builds in kineticism, like protons vibrating in an atom. A festival designed around communality and improvisation can sometimes lack for charismatic frontpeople, although that’s not a problem shared by Moroccan feminist punks Taqbir. The five-piece conceal their identities since their music puts them at severe risk of persecution by extolling freedom of expression for north African women, but their mission bursts through in the ecstasy of their singer’s performance. There is a risk, when writing about music with such urgent political intent, of neglecting how phenomenally fun it is: there is reeling static, the intensity of hardcore, their firework leader channelling Poly Styrene and Joey Ramone and wrapping the mic cord around her neck.
It’s also a tonic that many of the heaviest acts playing this weekend are fronted by women or female-identifying performers, and there is none heavier than extreme Melbourne-based doom band Divide and Dissolve, fronted by Takiaya Reed. Their breastbone-rattling sound is an expression of Reed’s campaigning for indigenous sovereignty and against colonialist atrocities; there is no mistaking the impact of those forces when exposed to music so loud it seems to drain the marrow from your bones. (There is an instant raid on earplugs at the bar.) But there is also beauty to their seismic force, with desolate sax notes searching through the steaming feedback, coupled with the arresting sight of Reed smiling throughout.
There are points across the rest of the evening where the volume comes to feel like madness: Welsh producer Elvin Brandhi’s set is a frenzy of screams and electronic blasts so intense it feels like being massaged with sandpaper; Justin Broadrick’s hometown heroes Godflesh make it feel as though every cell of your body is on trial; Zambian-Canadian rapper Backxwash has charisma to burn and actively defies the idea of passive consumption that can take hold at more lifestyle-centric music festivals. It all adds up to a deranged kind of joy.
Sunday, thankfully, offers some welcome emollience. After the Supersonic Mass parades down the industrial warrens of Digbeth, shaking bells, waving banners and trailed by one individual wearing a giant papier-mache mask that resembles Aphex Twin doing Alfred E Neuman, US duo 75 Dollar Bill play an hour of transportive guitar and spare percussion that evokes a gnarled, twisting river and bears shades of Tuareg guitar music.
Montreal’s Big|Brave and Jessica Moss teeter on the edge of catharsis but find more menace in holding back, building layers of guitar as jagged, imposing and sheer as a cliff face, while Robin Wattie’s keening vocals bring to mind Nina Nastasia singing traditional folk. The night climaxes with Irish folk stars Lankum, who conjure a magnificent sense of dread via Radie Peat’s sustained, off-kilter vocal harmonies, their swarming distortion and unresolved tension. Go Dig My Grave is as oppressive as being buried alive, conveying the earthy terror to their music: unlike the man vs machine showdown of Saturday night, the fear instead is that this horror could bubble up from within. The perfect ending to a festival that makes itself felt in your bones and spirit.
