Supersonic Festival 2014 – collective memory

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Sly & The Family Drone courtesy of @staggerleef

A massive thank you to all the artists, our incredible team, especially the amazing Supersonic volunteers and of course our audience for making this years Supersonic Festival Ltd Edtn a truly remarkable event. It is always such a pleasure to welcome back old friends and make new ones. Thank you & we hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.

We will start posting up our Supersonic Collective memory over the next few days, so feel free to send your comments and blog post links and photos to us, let us know your highlights.
 Supersonic photos should be added to our Flickr group (if you could tag them with band name & supersonic 2014)

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Ex Easter Island Head – Katja Ogrin

SUPERSONIC QUESTIONNAIRE

We know that people who come to SUPERSONIC are a knowledgeable and opinionated lot so we’d like to ask for your assistance to develop and improve the next festival by answering a few questions about you and your experience. This should take no more than a few minutes of your time, and your feedback is greatly appreciated.
Your answers here will aid us in keeping our work going and in making sure new and interesting artists will keep coming to the festival – so your input really does matter in making SUPERSONIC work.

I’m  Stuart Maconie’s guest on the 6 Musics the Freakier Zone next Sat (7  June) from midnight – so make sure you tune in

Previews
Culture 24 -“Annual muso-art factory of wonders Supersonic returns to Birmingham at the end of this month. The line-up is as intriguing as ever.”

The Skinny – “Birmingham’s Supersonic Festival occupies an exalted position at the vanguard of the festival circuit. And rightly so. Since its inception over ten years ago, it has maintained a staggeringly focused and intelligent curatorial policy, transcending the music and art worlds to present a programme teeming with invention, audience participation and a certain amount of unpredictability. It’s also a bloody good knees up.”

Polaroids and Polar Bears – “For over ten years, Supersonic Festival, one of the feathers in Capsule’s eclectic cap, has specialised in provocation and revelled in showcasing some of alternative culture’s most bizarre curios to the world. In its consistent championing of music and visual art’s wackiest, most abrasive and avant-garde performers, Supersonic is a festival re-made and re-modelled for the modern age.

Remaining stoutly averse to the suffocating strictures of the mainstream, Supersonic’s line-ups have always been flavoured with misfit geniuses and musical visionaries. Since its inception, it has become celebrated for providing a platform for those artists who proudly choose to thumb their noses at convention.”

The Quietus – “For a festival to survive it has to keep evolving, challenging itself as much as its audience.”

The Guardian – “Birmingham’s alternative festival goes bespoke this year with a “limited edition” event, a smaller two-dayer with a capacity of just a few hundred, and a stellar lineup.”

Societe Pierre – The 10 Best Festivals You’ve Never Heard Of

BBC 6 Music – Matmos interview

Louder Than War
Fluid Radio
Bass Explorer
Birmingham Mail
Attn Magazine – interview with Sly and The Family Drone

 

Reviews
BBC 6 Music
“Lisa Meyer the brains behind Supersonic Festival, one of the leading experimental music events in the UK joins Stuart with some records.”

The Arts Desk – “two days just isn’t enough when the entertainment’s this good.” 5/5

The Times – ” this unique boutique festival has long provided a fertile meeting point between hard rock, experimental techno and avant-garde art. Returning in a new springtime slot after a sabbatical in 2013, the weekend’s streamlined two-day event promised exotic musical genres including “hate sludge”, “fog beat” and “derelict electronics”. Excellent.” 4/5

Ninehertz – “Long may Supersonic reign, there’s nothing like it in the world and we like it that way.”

Left Lion – “a mixture of eclectic, obscure, strange and wonderful sounds for curious audiences.”

The Skinny – “The festival prides itself on multi-disciplinary approach to programming but this surely applies to the bands themselves as much as the staggering range of events on offer; almost every musical performance seesaws – often at ear-shattering levels – between some of the most high-altitude electronica and rock currently being imagineered, and some of the most aesthetically challenging on stage performances currently being thrummed out anywhere.”

The Birmingham Press “their refined curating abilities always reach their peak for Supersonic, where time is allowed for contrasts and combinations.”

Drowned In Sound – “Yet it is an undeniably marvellous and hugely entertaining spectacle.”

The Quietus – “Supersonic 2014 was a revitalising and refreshing weekend of challenging – and incredibly good fun – music in excellent company, and a pleasing air freshener against the stench of nostalgia one all too often encounters elsewhere. Here’s to 2015?

Echoes and Dust – “What’s great about Capsule is how self-effacing they are – they go to great lengths to make clear that this is a limited edition festival, much smaller than it would usually be.  They do this while providing two days of what would be a world-class line-up for any festival, let alone one taking place under a railway bridge in Digbeth. ”

All About Jazz – “With all that organizational sensible-ness taken care of, the platform was clear for the controlled chaos of the music, the sculpted anarchy that stands as the majority approach. If acts are making a hellish din, it helps if their loving attention to sonic distress is captured with all its warty textures intact, laid out for targeted cranial bombardment.”

Bass Explorer – “Supersonic does things right, sometimes very right. Sometimes the festival will present you with an act that will stretch your brain across internal spaces while rocking you back and forth to a rhythm that you can’t be sure exists. It seems pretty self-evident that an experimental music festival lives or dies by the ability to find acts that can hold a whole mess of contradictions in constant tension: If an artist armed with a synthesiser can simultaneously wash your soul down with an ocean of bass fuzz and brutalise your body with a sound that forces you to work to find the beat in amongst a forest of disorientating percussive stabs, then they’ve succeeded. Happy to say, Supersonic delivered.”

If Wet Supersonic documentation great overview of the involvement of artist duo MortonUnderwood as part of the festival

Hickey Sonic – Vodka and Tonic “Supersonic festival then, what a truly magnificent thing it is.”

Brum Notes – “Within this range lays a sublime mix that pushes the boundaries of modern music to the level where superlatives are not sufficient in describing what was about to come.”

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Supersonic Kids Gig credit Katja Ogrin

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2 Responses to “Supersonic Festival 2014 – collective memory”

  1. Capsule ) Supersonic ‘Collective Memory’ /

    […] will start posting up our Supersonic Collective memory over the next few days, so feel free to send your comments, let us know what your highlights were, […]

  2. The guy who did the DiS review has to be the biggest pretentious douche ever, especially what he wrote about Sly, back to your bedroom 14 year old boy!

    It sounds like he didn’t get any of it.