With all the early bird tickets already sold out, Supersonic are keen to keep thrill-hungry punters satisfied and have announced some extremely notable new additions to an already sumptuous line up over the weekend of 21-23 October.
First and foremost, is the enigmatic and influential Silver Apples, now a solo act, SIMEON, aka “The Oscillation Man”, who sings and plays his famous hand-made instrument, ‘The Simeon”, made of ‘nine audio oscillators piled on top of each other and eighty-six manual controls to control lead, rhythm and bass pulses with hands, feet and elbows’.
Silver Apples appeared on the New York scene in 1967. Far from the Dead/Airplane-influenced West Coast hippies, their psychedelic music came with a dark-repetitive-New-York-scary flavour that did not sound like the rest of the Summer of Love. Friends with Jimi Hendrix, headliners to the Central Park 1969 Festival celebrating the first man on the Moon, Silver Apples and their two cultish albums were also way ahead of their time. Decades after their brief yet influential career first ground to a sudden and mysterious halt, the Silver Apples remain one of pop music’s true enigmas: a surreal, almost unprecedented duo, their music explored interstellar drones and hums, pulsing rhythms and electronically-generated melodies years before similar ideas were adopted in the work of acolytes ranging from Suicide to Spacemen 3 to Laika.
Another very special new addition to the line up is one of the most compelling figures in 20th century music, a giant in the American soundscape, Tony Conrad. Since the early 1960s, he has utilized intense amplification, long duration and precise pitch to forge an aggressively mesmerizing “Dream Music”. Conrad continues to exert a primal influence over succeeding generations with his ecstatic oscillations and hypnotic drones, overall a profoundly influential composer whose radical styles defies textbook definitions and challenges accepted notions of the minimalist canon.
To counter-balance the chaotic sounds of the festival, Nathan Bell, former Lungfish bassist, will calm our exhausted minds with his cyclic banjo music, true meditative hymns for the soul.
Also now taking to the stage are a band on top of their game, the shimmeringly blissful Circle. They will be delivering their rhythmic amalgam of hazy psyche, metal, progressive avant-rock and krautrock, no doubt with some surprises. And if we are lucky, we will get to hear some of the infectious jams from their new album. Of course, it would be absurd to not invite instrumental stoner rockers Pharaoh Overlord to play, given that the band features members of Circle. So prepare to be mesmerised by their utterly immersive hypnotic sounds. In keeping with the ‘Circle’ theme, Supersonic are pleased to announce their first film screening, Man With A Video Camera by Petri Hagner, a film about a man who decides to pursue his artistic talents by directing a film about the band Circle. A highly appropriate choice for the film programme, we hope you agree.
Another film just added to the programme is Kill All Redneck Pricks: KARP LIVES! 1990-1998, the biography of a friendship. Set in the Pacific Northwest against the backdrop of the Olympia, WA post punk and Riot girl movements of the early 90’s, the film details the joys and tragedies of three young friends who rise above their surroundings to form a band called KARP.
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