In May this year, Supernormal hosted its first one-week art & music residency at Braziers Park for six artists who had previously taken part in Supernormal festival. During the week, artists researched the unique history of Braziers Park and engaged with the site and community whilst sharing ideas, knowledge and inspirations together as a group.

For the festival, each artist will present new work that has been developed in response to their experience of the residency.

For a glimpse of what took place on the residency, see the blog which includes revealing recordings, live-transmissions, images and texts by the artists.
We are very excited to announce a new two-year programme devised to develop collaboration between organisations and platforms from cities across the UK who have a shared interest in representing forward-thinking, underground and experimental art and music.

For Supernormal 2016, we are working with partners across seven cities to produce and programme exciting performances and new projects for the festival. As an exchange, Supernormal will depart rural Braziers Park and travel to the urban sprawl of each city to co-produce a multi-disciplinary project or event in Autumn 2017.

City Partners are:
Counterflows (Glasgow), an annual contemporary music festival promoting challenging and thought provoking work.
Upset the Rhythm (London), a live music promoter and record label based in London, UK – collectively run, with a sense of fun and a DIY ethic.
Bristol Experimental Expanded Film (Bristol), a film and sound collective and place of vibrant discussion initiated to support and nurture experimental film.
Spike Island Associates (Bristol), a membership network built on a culture of collaboration and experimentation for artists, writers, curators, designers and other creative practitioners.
WARP/G39 (Cardiff), Wales Artist Resource Programme (WARP) is an artist-run space and invaluable resource for emerging artists.
Islington Mill (Manchester), an artists studios and event space presenting interdisciplinary public arts and music programmes.
Modern Art Oxford (Oxford), celebrates contemporary visual culture within society through presentation and participation.
Oxford Contemporary Music (Oxford), produces new music and sound-based live events.
Supersonic (Birmingham), one of the UK’s premier experimental music and arts festivals.
Following the success of projects within The Pink Shed at Supernormal from 2013-2015, we have developed new artist commissions for Supernormal 2016 - to transform the common garden shed into intriguing enclaves, micro museums, curious shelters, provocative installations or miniature venues.

‘Be A Beast’ Mask Making

Artist Abigail Reed will be using her paintings as inspiration to lead a workshop in animal mask-making. Using paint and cardboard you can become a Bear, Stag or Hare! The workshop is aimed at children but all welcome.

Adrena Adrena

A collaboration between drummer E-Da Kazuhisa and visual artist Daisy Dickinson. ‘Adrena Adrena’ cuts a raw blend of drums, noise and organic visual work.

Through her film work, Dickinson has worked with everyone from The Flaming Lips to Deerhoof and Perfume Genius, whilst Kazuhisa has had a fruitful history drumming with groups like The Boredoms, Cuz, Drum Eyes and Seefeel.

Aine O’Dwyer

Áine O Dwyer is a vocalist, musician, improviser, composer, performer and visual artist. Her performances can take the form of living sound sculptures or assemblages which often bring into play mythical and satirical characters of Irish decent. In recent years, the pipe organ has become an integral site for her experimentation, culminating in the new albums ‘Locusts’ and ‘Gegenschein’. The forthcoming ‘Gallarais’ experiments with acoustic decay, and was developed during her self made residency at the Brunel tunnel shaft, London. All three releases celebrate her interests in acoustic phenomena, deep listening and the search for alternative scores through a combined performativity of instruments, drawings, space, time, memory and the body. Past solo releases include ‘Anything Bright or Startling? and ‘Music for Church Cleaners’.

Angela Rawlings

For Supernormal, Angela Rawlings will perform from echolology, a sound-poetry score.

Angela Rawlings has been selected by Counterflows (Glasgow) as part of the City Partners Programme 2016-17.

Angela Rawlings champions environmental stewardship through acoustic ecology, counter-mapping, and geopoetics. As a writer-activist, her literary output includes Wide slumber for lepidopterists (Coach House Books, 2006) and o w n (CUE BOOKS, 2015). Wide slumber received an Alcuin Award for Design; the book was adapted for stage production by VaVaVoom, Bedroom Community, and Valgeir Sigurðsson in 2014. She has also penned libretti for Davíð Brynjar Franzson (Longitude) and Gabrielle Herbst (Bodiless). Her music group Moss Moss Not Moss (with Rebecca Bruton) made its debut at the 2016 Glasgow Tectonics Music Festival.

Rawlings is the recipient of a Chalmers Arts Fellowship (Canada, 2009) and held the position of Arts Queensland Poet-in-Residence (Australia, 2012). During the latter experience, she created Gibber, a digital publication showcasing sound and visual poetry from Australian bioregions. Written while undergoing breast-cancer treatment, rawlings’ work Áfall / Trauma was shortlisted for the 2013 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Playwrights, and is forthcoming from Broken Dimanche Press.

Angela Rawlings: EAR KNOWS THROAT

Join artist Angela Rawlings for a sound and writing workshop, EAR KNOWS THROAT.

The writers will be influenced by the immediate soundscape — which will commence as environmental, but will then move into a brief pre-semantic or proto-semantic improvised sound poetry. Writers are encouraged to notice how what they hear impacts their writing. Do they flow with it, tune it out, incorporate it into their texts, or struggle upstream against the soundscape?

Writers will be invited to contribute to the soundscape. Other writers will continue to write as their peers read, further being influenced by the multiple languages in the soundscape around them.

Everyone who attends is invited to bring their favourite writing material — paper, journal, pen, pencil, crayons, lipstick, markers, mobile phone etc…

Apostille

Apostille is the alias of Glasgow-based Michael Kasparis. ‘Using sweat-stained, decaying machinery to create denigrated pop music injected with a poison, Apostille is the last resort of a man with too few problems, but blown out of all proportion. Living in the moment, trying to get out’.

Image courtesy of Dawid Laskowski.

Arts & Projects Tour with BIAW

Join members of Braziers International Artists Workshop (BIAW) for a tour of this years arts projects across the site at Braziers Park – taking in the new shed commissions, activities, installations and performances you can hear their thoughts on the work and find out about the development of the workshop and Supernormal.

BIAW is a non-profit making, artist-led organisation set up in 1995 with an artist residency that took place each August at Braziers Park until 2010 when Supernormal evolved.

BIAW provides a meeting point for artists working in all visual disciplines. Their residencies bought together up to 30 artists of all nationalities for 16 days to work, exchange dialogue and experiment in a way that is mutually beneficial. It offered an opportunity of participating in an activity removed geographically and conceptually from usual studio practice; in an environment where experiments can be made and leaps of imagination can occur.

Arvind Ganga

Six-string satyr taking a physical approach to guitar playing, employing objects and extended techniques to explore new sonic possibilities. His music draws from noise and drones, North Indian ragas, rock, and everyday sounds. With free improvisation he molds this into an intense, loosely structured, chaotic mesh, bathing in the rays of a deep red sun. Ethereal noise with a punk-improv attitude.

Ashtray Navigations

We’re beyond delighted to welcome this psychedelic institution to Braziers – put simply, there’s no racket quite so tumultuous and transcendent as that made by Ashtray Navigations, whose sound unites past and present, chaos and cosmos, and has charted a path from the Leeds underground to the stars.

Asiq Nargile

Born in Tbilisi and now based in the Borcali region of Southern Georgia, Nargile Mehtiyeva aka Asiq Nargile has been playing saz (long-neck lute) and singing since the age of 15. Fluent in Azerbaijani, Georgian, and Russian, Nargile represents the cosmopolitan heritage of old Tbilisi, a city once known as a meeting point for multilingual aşıq bards who would travel through the region serving as conduits for news, ideas, music and culture. A powerful solo performer, her vocal recital of epic folk poetry is by turns ecstatic and deeply expressive, and is interspersed with bursts of virtuosic, highly ornamented saz. Equally comfortable performing moving laments or upbeat folk dances, Nargile is currently the only female aşıq living and performing in the ethnic Azeri region of Georgia, and has been teaching the art to new generations. Thanks to the efforts of The Sayat Nova Project, a non-profit group aiming to help preserve and promote the diverse musical dialects of the Caucasus, European audiences can now experience the elusive, hypnotic beauty of Nargile’s music for themselves.

Atari Punk Console

Specialist sound workshops with Farmer Glitch & Eastville Project Space.

Work with The Atari Punk Console workshop to create a cute little noise making, standalone synth with built in amp and speaker for portable noise-goodness that makes a great basis for other synth projects.
An ideal project for young people and beginners.

Workshop is £15 – all materials will be provided, and participants will be able to keep the synths upon completion of the sessions.

Places are limited to 10 people per session, so book your place ahead of the festival by contacting: [email protected]

Eastville Project Space is an independent art space in Yeovil, Somerset – providing a creative hub for collaboration, where artists, musicians, designers and hackers can develop and produce innovative projects, with a programme including commissions, residencies, events and workshops.

Babaloose

Babaloose is an ongoing group project based in Glasgow that explores the converging spaces between writing, performance and visual art.

Babaloose is an open event, no structures or headline acts. The audience is the headline act! It is about the politics of performing, and the power of an audience as a self-organising creative community. Everyone is invited to join in, no sign-up sheets just turn up with something to read, sing, communicate and we will listen, applaud and have merriment.

This is an event designed to encourage potential performers, writers and artists. So if you have never performed before or shared your writing, Babaloose is the perfect place to start out.

Babaloose will also run participatory workshop to design the set for the open event at Supernormal.

Babaloose: set design workshop

Babaloose is an ongoing group project based in Glasgow that explores the converging spaces between writing, performance and visual art.

Join Babaloose for a workshop that explores the basics of theatrical set design, childhood den building and Arte Povera sculpture-making to create an ideal portable performance space for an open platform Babaloose event at Supernormal. How will the space shape the event? How can we make a flexible and adaptive stage that will encourage potential performers, writers and artists? How do we address the divide between performer and audience in a creative and unique way?

Open to everyone interested in creating a communal space for experimental art making and performance.

Baby Bolide Sonic Crèche

Returning to Supernormal with the sonic crèche after its success in 2013, Bolide are Brighton’s ‘finest troupe of free-jazz merrymakers’, and will be making the most of the disinhibition of infants. Members of the band who moonlight in social care and education will be on hand to encourage maximum din and spontaneous magical correlations. Lots of instruments and sound making devices will be available to get stuck into, with an emphasis on having fun and making a joyful noise. Just the ticket for parents who are feeling a bit fragile in the morning!

Children must be accompanied by an adult.

Bare Plume Cafe Bar

After a vibrant debut last year the Bare Plume Cafe Bar returns for Supernormal 2016 to bring you pick-me-up cocktails, ethical-but-not-boring food. Bare Plume will also be hosting performances at the cafe and will be busting out specially curated playlists from artists taking part in the festival.

Bare Plume, organise music and art events in DIY spaces, mostly in and around Bradford, and have been ‘indulging senses on a shoestring’ with a mix of underground entertainment, mind-bending cocktails and cruelty-free-but-not-boring food since 2013 providing sustenance to many a banging festival, gallery opening and club night.

The Bare Plume team have worked together on collaborative events and in other guises including Wish you’d been here, art collective Black Dogs, Art In Unusual Spaces, Bradford Threadfest and the domestic gallery 38b in Peckham.

BAS JAN

The three-piece line-up of Serafina Steer, Jenny Moore and Sarah Anderson deal out a vibrant, insouciant and defiantly uncategorisable brand of experimental pop, as indebted to the off-kilter stylings of The Slits as the elegiac strains of Steer’s solo work. Dealing out poignant tales of the everyday and kraut-inspired wig-outs alike, Bas Jan are as punk rock in spirit as they are poetic.

Big Joanie

Big Joanie are a black feminist punk band based in London. They are Chardine (drums & amp; vocals), Steph (guitar & amp; vocals) and Kiera (bass & amp; vocals).

Big Joanie formed to make powerful music but also to create a continuum for black punks by presenting a strong, powerful vision of black womanhood and to inspire more young black punks to start the bands they always wanted to hear.

Black Metal High Impact Aerobics

Cardiovascular holocaust!!!!

Get your black heart beating and feel your soul burning with a rigorous thirty-minute workout rite!!!!

Only for the daring early risers!!!

Drop and gimme six hundred and sixty six!!!!

Bowie vs. Prince Karaoke

With this year seeing the uber sad and untimely passing of two absolute musical legends, the resident Supernormal karaoke session just had to be a homage to these two beyond-comparison geniuses. Come sing your heart and lungs out to your favourites.

Hosted in-style by performers from from Beacons, Icons and Dykons: Tom Marshman as Bowie with his side-kick Amanda Radix as Prince.

Braziers House Tour

Join Braziers resident Mark Jones on a tour to learn about the incredible architecture of the Grade II* listed mansion house and the unique history of Braziers Park School of Integrative Social Research. The tour will also reveal secrets about the people that have frequented the place in the past including John Latham and Marianne Faithfull (see if you can spot the ceiling hook in the library where Ian Fleming’s cradle once hung).

Meet at the front entrance to the house at midday on Saturday.

Bridget Hayden & Claire Potter

Bridget Hayden and Claire Potter make vocally charged sound works, rooted in the affective nature of trauma. Potter’s worlds build around a site of impact; an accident, an exchange, a violence, without ever fully stating the cause. The unspoken instead hangs in the air, suspended by the tension of error. Generating noises in wordless solidarity to Potter’s viscerous reading, Hayden both supports and challenges it’s delivery according to her own levels of discomfort.

Throughout their performances they attempt to locate themselves within their bodies, allowing the struggle to produce an alignment of forces, or else risk subversion.

Their 2015 EP Mother To No Swimming Laughing Child (FortEvilFruit) was described by The Wire’s Frances Morgan as ‘rooted in quotidian horror’ and by Radio Free Midwich’s Sophie Cooper as ‘one of the most intriguing and thought provoking recordings I’ve ever heard’.

Brigitte Hart (A Capella)

Brigitte Hart presents an a capella performance of 5-6 ‘folk’ songs from around the world all with their own story of lament. Included in the set will be ‘Thalassaki Mou’ a traditional Greek folk song potentially hundreds of years old. Other songs featuring would be Hodie (Latin Procession Song), Miss Otis Regrets (Ella Fitzgerald), Yeroushalaim Chel Zahav (Traditional, Hebrew/English) and the Australian National Anthem- sung with the tune and words backwards (which ends up sounding somewhat like a Scottish lament).

Brigitte Hart is an Australian-born sound and performance artist currently based in London. Specialising in voice, violin and environmental recordings her work spans experimental improvisation, installation, acoustic ecology, film, score and sound design.

In 2015 Brigitte was the recipient of the Australian Art Start Award which saw her partake in specialised workshops with environmental recording pioneer Chris Watson (BBC, David Attenborough) and performance artists Zierle and Carter. She also undertook a mentorship and performed regularly with Professor David Toop at institutions such as The Whitechapel Gallery and The London Contemporary Music Festival.

Bristol Experimental Expanded Film (BEEF): Cephalopod

Cephalopod is a collaborative film-based hub taking residence for the weekend of Supernormal 2016. Their striking mollusc-inspired shed hidden deep in the woods will host a selection of events including a 16mm film drop in workshop as the cephalopod transforms into a darkroom, experimental live soundscapes and performances, sound explorations and further excursions from BEEF members & friends including:

Saturday 11am – 1pm Cyanotype Workshop from Ruth Sharman.

Saturday 2pm Sonic Hide and Seek Workshop from Shirley Pegna.

Sunday 11am – 1pm 16mm Tinting Workshop from BEEF. (Suitable for 12 years & older).

Join them from 8pm each evening where there will be an array of experimental screenings from BEEF members, and music performances from Ian William Craig, Saltings, & Auto Bitch and others. Look out for the BEEF A-Board for more information.

BEEF is a self-sustaining film and sound collective with an analogue heart initiated to support and nurture experimental film in Bristol. BEEF currently inhabits a temporary space with a communal area for screening events and a darkroom with a contact printer and hand processing facilities for 16mm film. A place of vibrant discussion and skill sharing, BEEF curates a regular programme of events, run community film and sound workshops and host the Bristol LUX Critical Forum.

Casual Nun

A dizzying torrent of righteous repetition and acid-fried guitar overload, London noise-rock experimentalists Casual Nun are a perfect excuse to get back in the habit. Formed from the ashes of Dethscalator and Throne, they forge a mighty union between a feverishly fearless sonic modus operandi and a wide-eyed heaviosity, with elemental and incendiary results.

Casual Sect

Gnarled punk attack and dementoid aggression from a distinctly skewed metropolitan force, channelling the power of conspiracy theories and knackered old hardcore 7″s into a poisonous brew as iconoclastic as it is idiotic. Surfing a grindcore-poisoned wave from the spirit of John Peel to the apocalypse, these Icke-obsessed miscreants are our fave harbingers of doom.

Cath and Phil Tyler

Cath from Massachusetts; Phil, from Newcastle upon Tyne. They Come together musically through a shared love of traditional narrative song, full voiced sacred harp singing and sparse mountain banjo. Taking a minimal, stripped back approach to their material, they have been described as ‘a highly concentrated and intimate musical experience that penetrates to the very rawest essence of folk tradition’.

Cavalier Song

Cavalier Song’s cinematic brand of exploratory sonic adventure is uncategorisable save for the primal charge of their onslaught – stormclouds of atmosphere and intensity collide in a haunting and powerful brand of symphonic power and elemental abstraction.

CHAMP: Meet the Puppets

‘CHAMP presents: Meet the Puppets’ – a participatory puppet and noise making workshop where you can explore your inner wild(er)ness through the power of sacred JUJU and rollicking role-play. Using the absurdity of newly-conceived characters to delve into the hidden depths of the cosmos and accelerate, participants will fast track beyond reality to connect with that which is (((beyond))).

At the end of the session, festival goers are invited to join CHAMP as they lead a procession around the site with a motley crew of collected musicians and noise-makers.

CHAMP is a Bristol-based artist collective, formed in 2014 by UWE graduates and situated at Ringside Studios in Bristol. Although comprised of 14 individual artists with diverse practices, CHAMP also work collaboratively, creating participatory events including The Champ Experience at Spike Island and The Ascent at Knowle West Media Centre.

Charles Hayward – Zigzag + Swirl

Charles Hayward needs no introduction, his kinetic percussive talents and restless mercurial vision having blazed a trail across the British avant-garde for the last four decades, from Quiet Sun through This Heat to Camberwell Now and a plethora of solo material. Following two dazzling performances last year, he returns to Braziers to perform a solo set in the Zig-Zag + Swirl formation – this comprises a performance in which technology is used to open uncertainty in songs that surf his muse’s trademark combination of a psychedelic continuum and the startling other.

Charles Hayward: The Bell Agency

This workshop comprises a simple game structure for 3 or more players, The Bell Agency opens out into a mesmerising slow motion sound world. Somewhere between performance and unfolding, it depends on cluster maths, hive mind and the unique details to be witnessed. Open to all those aged from 5 to 6 onwards and willing to participate in this zen, engaging and startlingly educational audial activity.

Christopher Josiffe: Talk

Strange Attractor presents Christopher Josiffe presenting a talk on Gef the talking mongoose.

A true tale of the supernatural from the 1930s, where a family living in a remote part of the isle of man played host to an entity that called itself Gef. Gef liked to play games, sing songs, hunt rabbits, eat cakes and throw things around. He lived with them for about 5 years and became an international celebrity.

Christopher Josiffe has had an interest in all aspects of the esoteric since his teenage years, when a sympathetic maths teacher introduced him to the works of T.C. Lethbridge and Eliphas Levi. His interests include: visiting prehistoric sites, real ale & fine cheeses, the Western Esoteric Tradition, Spiritualism, psychical investigators Harry Price, Eric Dingwall and others, electronic voice phenomena, African religions, the origins of language, and dancing to or playing obscure reggae and Northern Soul recordings from the 1960s and 1970s.

Strange Attractor started out as a series of live events, and has slowly transmuted into an annual publication, set up an online clearing house for the weird and the wonderful and recently made its first move towards establishing itself as a publishing house. “Strange Attractor celebrates unpopular culture,” runs its mission statement. “We declare war on mediocrity and a pox on the foot soldiers of stupidity. Join us.” Who could possibly resist such a challenge? Sooner or later you have to get involved.

Christos Fanaras

London-based electronic artist Christos Fanaras has a long history of mischief and aural bedlam in a variety of guises, yet his solo work draws a line between kosmische exploration, wry surrealism, unforgivingly bleak ambience and all points in between. His work is equal parts Drift and damage, melancholy and malevolence.

City Hands

Manuel Padding, aka City Hands, is renowned for installation work at festivals like Kraak fest, AFMS weekend, and his work at Helbaard. City Hands is his project dealing in maximal and lo-fi electronic abandon.

“City Hands incarnates his visions in improvised nervous noise trips and in dreamy incantations, all infused in seventies movies weirdness and classical science-fiction peaceful landscapes, using cymbals, voice, pedals of effects, tibetan bowl, flute, tapes​, smoke​ and moving images to transport. His narratives generally evoke a world where humans no longer prevail, a stream of words lurking into post-apocalyptic loneliness and colourful magic. Opening bridges between worlds for more than a decade, Manuel Padding throws rocks with pure elegance, and makes connections between people, continents and genres, never the easy way.”

Cup

We’ve been trying to book Verity Susman for Supernormal seemingly since the festival started, which makes it all the more of a pleasure to welcome her under the auspices of her new trio Cup, also featuring Matt Simms and Lucy Lucy Jamieson, and traversing a riotous improvisatory trajectory of motorik, psychedelic and free jazz with abandon and intrigue to spare.

Cyanotype Workshop

Using this simple historic photographic process, you will be able to create your own beautiful blue-prints using found materials, music related objects and the sun’s rays.

Cyanotypes are a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print. Engineers used the process well into the 20th century as a simple and low-cost process to produce copies of drawings, referred to as blueprints.

David Chatton Barker & Sam Mcloughlin (Film Material)

Cognitive liberation happenings and ritual instruments…..

David Chatton Barker works with alchemical processes of transmuting the mundane into the mystical through mimesis of human and nature explored through analogue film, homemade instruments and performance. David also runs Folklore Tapes – an open-ended research project exploring the vernacular arcana of Great Britain and beyond; traversing the myths, mysteries, magic and strange phenomena of the old counties via abstracted musical reinterpretation and experimental visuals.

Sam Mcloughlin aka Sam and the Plants creates wonderfully erratic journeys through acoustic guitar meanderings and ambient drone detours through to electronic feedback.

DJ Shitmat

After a bit of a hiatus while his real-life name-sake Henry Collins explored other musical journeys, Shitmat returns for a rare appearance at Supernormal.

For years Shitmat has been twisting hardcore, jungle and more into some of Britain’s most fractured music, his albums finding a home on Planet Mu and similar labels. His 2012 project Mash Hits represents, in his own words, a re-imagination of “the entire history of chart music through remixing, bastardizing and reconstructing it.” With the UK singles chart 60 years old on November 14 2012, Shitmat uploaded a series of tracks that, once the whole project is done, promises to feature music from every single UK number one in that time – 1209 songs in total, of which Shitmat has already used 960 – with “no other samples, synths or sound sources allowed at all.”

‘Avin it!

Dwellings

The techno-driven, binary-babylon-resident alter ego of Gnod’s Chris Haslam, Dwellings turns out dystopian and hypnotic beat-driven soundscapes that combine monochrome discord with a twisted heart and soul.

Eastville Project Space: Sound Workshops

Eastville Project Space will be leading specialised Synth Building Workshops Workshops led by Farmer Glitch using kits produced for ‘Yeovil Hacker Space’ by ‘Whitford Research Limited’. They will be running a number of workshops to build standalone noise machines including:

*Atari Punk Console – a cute little noise maker that makes a great basis for other synth projects. Distorted tones and screaming lead lines. An ideal project for young people and beginners. Standalone synth – with built in amp and speaker for portable noise-goodness !!

*HalfWatt – A power amp – great for distorted guitar sounds or simply amplifying your MP3 player/synth or whatever. A whopping 0.5 WATTS – into a small speaker giving overloaded valve-driven sounds in a VERY SMALL package. Build the circuit and mount it in a vessel (beer-can/cereal-box/r Beer Mug) – plug in your instrument – and WIG OUT !!

*PunkSeq10 combining a 10 step sequencer and an Atari Punk Console for glitchy grooves. Great project for those with previous soldering experience. This consists of a distorted-noise machine – being driven by a step-sequencer – allowing either 4, 8 or 10 steps – build it, stick the battery in for industrial techno-fun …

Workshops will be limited to 10 people each session and are £10-£15 – all materials will be provided and participants will be able to keep the synths upon completion of the sessions. To book your place please email: [email protected]

Eastville Project Space is an independent art space in Yeovil, Somerset – providing a creative hub for collaboration, where artists, musicians, designers and hackers can develop and produce innovative projects, with a programme including commissions, residencies, events and workshops.

Film House Hats

Anyone who’s been to Supernormal for the past few years will be sure to recall witnessing ‘The Hat Lady’ AKA Liz Wakefield donning incredible detailed cardboard hats that have included a helter-skelter, Braziers House, and Supernormal’s very own Shed Stage to mention a few.

For Supernormal 2016, Liz will bring her collection of newly created illuminated hats depicting houses from well-known films lovingly and laboriously hand-crafted especially for the festival. Liz will be joined by pal Caroline Mullins. Stop them to say hi and marvel at their new creations as they appear after dark every evening for maximum effect!

Film Material

Members of Film Material will be ‘in residence’ in the all new Vortex space, presenting expanded filmic performances, screenings and projections to activate and punctuate the space throughout the weekend.

FILM MATERIAL is an inclusive collective who work with diverse approaches to artists moving image, film, video, photography and light. They run public events, including screenings, expanded film performances and workshops and are based at Rogue Artists Studios in Manchester as a platform for critical discussion of work-in-progress, and sharing homemade soup.

Flowers Must Die

A fearsome blend of psychotropic extrapolations and balls-out abandon. Sweden’s Flowers Must Die forge an interstellar continuum between the wild, freeform wig-outs of native forebears like Träd, Gräs & Stenar, Baby Grandmothers and Älgarnas Trädgård, and the here and now. With a new album scheduled for release on Rocket Recordings later this year, we’re delighted to be welcoming this collective over for their first ever shows outside of Scandinavia. Heads will roll, brains will fry, and if the flowers wanna die you’d better let ’em.

Georgia Horgan

Georgia Horgan is interested how social and political histories are represented and the mechanics of alternative ways of teaching and learning. She uses video, performance, sculpture, appropriation and collaboration to consider social movements, with works often exploring how mainstream ideology and traditional beliefs are constructed.

For her project at Supernormal, Georgia has been researching ‘intentional communities’ and different ideas about how knowledge can be produced, with particular focus on women’s movements and mysticism. As part of the Shed Commissions, Georgia has made a reading resource that traces this history from medieval Beguines communities and heretic sects to Braziers Park School of Integrative Social Research.

The reading material will sit along side a series of textile works, which are based on the cloth used for ‘samarras’—the ceremonial robes heretics were forced to wear during trials. Whilst providing a place to read and reflect on Supernormal’s setting, the works consider the connections between heretic movements and modern communes. These works were originally commissioned by Glasgow International and funded by the Elephant Trust.

Georgia Horgan: Phlaag Pole Commission

For the annual Phlaag Pole commission, Georgia Horgan has produced a new textile work that explores her interests in craft, the mechanisation of the textile industry and the production of history tapestries from the beginning of several medieval women’s communes.

Giant Swan

Mercurial electronic trash-trawlers uniting the hypnotic glow of effects pedal lights with the glow of dancefloor strobes, Giant Swan are masters of binary hedonism and anarchic abandon. Mighty noise, rhythmic interplay and an otherworldly allure collide with trainwreck malice, yet fiercely compelling results.

Girl Sweat

Russell Gray’s one-man garage-party extravaganza hammers out the jams like some nightmarish collision of Coachwhips, John Shuttleworth and John Maus, or like The Sonics stranded on Mars with only a Casio keyboard for company.

GirlFrenzy to CroneFrenzy

In 1991 Erica Smith spent the money she ‘should’ have spent on Poll Tax to publish the zine ‘GirlFrenzy’– articles, strips & no make-up tips. GirlFrenzy was a top ten zine in Melody Maker two years running, with a stellar cast of women contributors. It celebrated female comics artists, musicians and anarcha-feminism, and developed in parallel with Riot Grrrl. It was always ‘By Women for People’ – the ‘Odd Boy’ was welcome.

Several of the women involved with GirlFrenzy are Supernormal regulars who will use SN2016 for a GirlFrenzy ReUnion, to recruit like minds and gather material for the first GirlFrenzy since 1999.

Erica Smith leads a precarious existence as a graphic designer and still writes and draws. At SuperNormal she’ll still be doing all those things, and introducing you to the mindful martial art of Fucky-Offy.
Rachael House is an artist and she will be thoroughly queering the surrounding area.
Liz Wakefield will bring an interactive ‘lets build a giant SUPERNORMAL fuzzy felt’ and a collection of illuminated hats.
Deborah Ewing is former lead singer and Stylophonist of Sexlovebusterbaby! Deborah Ewing AKA The Pink Minx will be bringing some crafting shenanigans with a subversive twist.
Loulou Cousin is part of the Hastings/Outrageous Decadence posse. She makes anti-motivational manifestoes and is an all-round WünderKrone.
Georgie House is a feminist and photographer. She is far too young to remember GirlFrenzy, she will be assisting and documenting the team.

Goodiepal & Pals

GOODIEPAL WITH DANIEL S. BØTCHER + GRØN + NYNNE ROBERTAH PEDERSEN PEDERSEN

Radical Danish/Faroese artist, musician, storyteller and composer Parl Kristian Bjørn Vester – aka Goodiepal. With a performance style as enthralling as it is unclassifiable, Goodiepal draws on electronic music, computer technology, spoken word and broader cultural theory. Utterly unique.

“[His] utterly transfixing homemade musical contraptions and decidedly eccentric set-up, featuring a table filled with strange models of planets and a glass-caged metallic bird, had the whole audience rapt,not knowing whether to laugh or cry at the unconventional beauty of his astonishing performance.” – Susanna Glaser, THE WIRE

Graham Dunning – Mechanical Techno

Uniting the technological and the primitive, magus of the lo-fi Dunning creates an apparatus to reap repetition through nuts and bolts in sweet harmony.

Gum Takes Tooth

Binary bedlam and percussive tumult from one of London and the UK’s most square-peg and building-levelling duos, guaranteed to bring both party and apocalypse in short order. Gum Takes Tooth are Supernormal vets, having played for us in 2011, yet the last five years has only seen their Frankenstein-style setup morph in ways that continue to leave the majority of noisemakers in the dirt.

Guttersnipe

This Leeds two-piece dive straight into a cauldron of hellish improv-skronk, paint-stripping abstract noise and nightmarishly deconstructed sonic catharsis – imagine the esoteric mayhem of Angel Blood combined with the venue-destroying psychic power of early Boredoms and Naked City, and you ain’t even close. Comprising the duo of Xylocopa Violacea and Bdallophytum, if Guttersnipe don’t blow away your Saturday morning cobwebs, nothing will.

Half Watt

Specialist sound workshops with Farmer Glitch & Eastville Project Space.

HalfWatt – Build a power amp – great for distorted guitar sounds or simply amplifying your MP3 player/synth or whatever. A whopping 0.5 WATTS – into a small speaker giving overloaded valve-driven sounds in a VERY SMALL package. Build the circuit and mount it in a vessel (beer-can/cereal-box/r Beer Mug) – plug in your instrument – and WIG OUT !!

Workshop is £15 – all materials will be provided, and participants will be able to keep the synths upon completion of the sessions.

Places are limited to 10 people per session, so book your place ahead of the festival by contacting: [email protected]

Eastville Project Space is an independent art space in Yeovil, Somerset – providing a creative hub for collaboration, where artists, musicians, designers and hackers can develop and produce innovative projects, with a programme including commissions, residencies, events and workshops.

Halftone

Early in 2016, Bristol-based improvisers Tina Hitchens, Yvonna Magda and Caitlin Alais Callahan drank some tea, ate some biscuits and embarked on a musical journey. Pushing past the conventions of their traditional instruments – flute, violin and double bass – the trio explore ever-expanding sonic possibilities. They play part-composed music; being interested in the conscious or unconscious improvisatory responses generated by musical, and extra-musical, prompts and restraints.

During the development of this work, the trio will collaborate with artist Ben Owen to generate an unique visual landscape. Owen will utilise existing visual material related to the history of the festival itself, Braziers Park, and the locality and it’s landscapes, to provoke musical responses from the trio: in Cornelius Cardew’s words, ‘the musician’s pursuit is to recognise the musical composition of the world’.

The trio’s initial reactions to Owen’s locally-based material will be recorded, and re-worked into new visual and aural material. The audiovisual performance of Halftone at Supernormal will present Owen’s new work, the trio’s part-composed counter to that, and their additional improvisatory impulses prompted by the sights, smells and sounds of the festival itself in action.

Hat Making Kids Workshop with The Hat Lady

Craft, create and decorate your own outlandish festival head-piece that lights up and take part in a procession through the festival after dark. This craft-based workshop will work with cardboard and other materials to create decorated hats, crowns, fitted with battery lights to illuminate.

This workshop is aimed at kids (though adults are permitted!) and is hosted by Liz Wakefield and Bridget Meyne. Liz is the oft-seen Hat Lady of Supernormal and Bridget is an illustrator and comic maker whose work is bold, bright and character based working in both 2D and 3D. She’s worked for a number of clients including Create London, FUNHOUSE magazine, BBY and Polyester.

Heather Leigh

Utilising the pedal steel and her voice, Heather Leigh mainlines a psychic force that’s at once primal, ethereal and otherworldly, her psychedelic hymnals uniting the West Virginia and Texas of her origins, the Glaswegian underground where she made her name, and an unheimlich spirit at the heart of the human condition.

Helm & Valentina Magaletti

The first in a new series of collaborative projects comprising both a commission and a performance for Supernormal, this sees experimental sound artist Helm AKA Luke Younger joining forces with visionary percussionist Valentina Magaletti (also of Tomaga, Vanishing Twin, The Oscillation and numerous other projects) to create a new work that appears destined to explore not only new hinterlands between acoustic and electronic, but a world where the tactile and alluring meets the willfully abrasive.

Collaborative performance between experimental sound artist Helm AKA Luke Younger joining forces with visionary percussionist Valentina Magalett to create a new work that appears destined to explore not only new hinterlands between acoustic and electronic, but a world where the tactile and alluring meets the willfully abrasive.

Herb Diamante

Herb Diamate is a self-styled ‘elegant post-apocalyptick drunken scarecrow who thinks he knows all the secrets of the unverse. He loves glamour, alcohol and pataphysics’ Somewhere between a character from a Lewis Carroll and a member of the Residents lurks this fellow, also performing this weekend with Vibracathedral Orchestra.

Here to Help (can’t you see the signs)

Seemingly helpful looking folks adorned in tabards with lollipop signs will be spotted wandering around Braziers Park over the weekend signalling they are ‘Here To Help’. Indeed they may well help the seeker but it may well not come in the form expected; if it is directions you require, instead you may well receive a little-known Sufi parable, some cosmic yogic wisdom, or a long-winded folkloric yarn acting as a commentary on capitalist culture and consumer branding in the age we live in.

Housewives

Inhabiting a monochrome liminal zone where nihilistic No-Wave geometry locks horns with kinetic rhythmic drive, Housewives are an unusually arresting outfit to emerge from the wilds of the London underground. Hypnotic, angular and charged with fervent energy, their clangour with relight your ire.

Ian William Craig

We’re delighted to welcome this startling experimental vocal artist, making his first ever appearance in Europe, and bringing his unique blend of celestial ambience and fractured abstraction to bewitch the countryside “graphic delicate,urgent/full of space,musicmoves shifting tectonic plates of vocalpianotape improvisations –. fields of oldest hiss,haunting: melodies, collapsing answersbillowing clouds of erasure/rebuilding”

IMPATV

Born from a love of 80’s & 90’s Public Access TV and alternative music shows, IMPATV is a conduit for the experimental, weird and wonderful, the typically ephemeral and sorts that are unavailable elsewhere.

We are dedicated to streaming and broadcasting the best of many styles of music and performance, developing a unique visual aesthetic tailored to each.

As well as filming live events we like to stay true to our origins by providing a Public Access style platform for video production.

Jack Catling: Threshold Connection

Jack will extend upon the Threshold Greeting piece which came about during the residency but this time will be utilising the perimeter of the house itself.

“What struck me on the residency was the way in which the building itself has been, from the very beginning, a container for a number of lives all seeking (Norman) Glaister’s ideal moment of communion. This brings to mind an idea of nested memory, each stone, each wooden panel, resonating with a shared intention, a moment of silent communication, waiting with baited breath for it’s moment. I wish to draw these invisible ghosts of intent out, giving them a fleeting physicality”.

Jack Catling is a London-based artist working mainly through the mediums of performance and installation. Through his practice he aims to bring about an atmospheric shift in ontological value, opening up a space for wonders to occur. Catling draws from his background in illusion, his interest in the value and perpetuity of symbols and a shady past built from various fictions. Jack is also a founding member of the performance group The Parlour Collective.

JK Flesh

Justin Broadrick is a personal hero of ours at Supernormal, having contributed to enough legendary records and boundary-breaking sonic innovations to render ten legends – from Napalm Death’s ‘Scum’ through Godflesh’s ‘Streetcleaner’ to Techno Animal and Final through to the present day, he’s an artist who has never rested on his laurels for a second, forever an iconoclast, and forever sonically righteous. JK Flesh, which sees beat-driven dystopia collide with cerebral satisfaction, is just the latest adventure for this perpetual iconoclast.

KIDS ADVENTURE WOODLAND PLAYGROUND

Lose your kids for hours as they play among the trees in Braziers magical woodland adventure playground.

Knifeworld

Marrying progressive whimsy with pure pop radiance, and delivering a tapestry of melody and abandon that defies description, Knifeworld – led by mercurial journeyman Kavus Torabi (Cardiacs/Gong/Guapo/Chrome Hoof and many more) deliver gloriously otherworldly and outré vibrations from the ether and the everyday.

Let’s… Play… Darts

‘Let’s… Play… Darts!’ is a pop-up, interactive installation, celebrating the art of dart; a freestanding dartboard, Professional Darts Corporation standard oche, dressing-up rail, glitter curtain and enthusiastic darts announcer. Join in for a festival darts championship bonanza.

‘Let’s… Play… Darts! is created by artist Laura Dee Milnes who works with performance, video, costume, object and text through her growing roster of female working-class personas constructed from collected observations, methods and imagery.

Light Field

Light Field is an off-grid, kinetically-powered participatory installation by sound artist Bill Thompson and choreographer Saffy Setohy; Made of, and activated by light, people and the sound of light.

Visually captivating, with a subtle sound score made of the sound of light and VLF/Natural Radio, Light Field playfully considers philosophical and practical ideas of contrasting needs for natural and technological light and darkness around the world, and our individual and collective relationship to energy generation and consumption.

The development of Light Field is being supported by Creative Carbon Scotland, Gayfield Creative Spaces, CCA Glasgow/Dance House and UZ Arts/InSitu.

Lina Lapelyte, Angharad Davies, Graham Dunning

New collaborative performance between three very different musicians especially for Supernormal.

Artist, composer, musician and performer, Lina Lapelyte’s practice, can be placed ‘in-between’ classical and experimental, music and fine art, composing and improvising. Initially trained as a classical violinist in Lithuania Lina showed an interest in experimental music from early on. Her performance-based practice is rooted in music and flirts with pop culture, gender stereotypes, aging and nostalgia.

Angharad Davies is a violinist, one at ease in both improvising and composition, with a wide discography as part of varied range of ensembles and groups. She’s a specialist in the art of ‘preparing’ her violin, adding objects or materials to it to extend its sound making properties. Her sensitivity to the sonic possibilities of musical situations and attentiveness to their shape and direction make her one of contemporary music’s most fascinating figures.

With a background in experimental electronic music, Graham Dunning makes things with sound and found objects to explore time and commemoration through personal archives – photographs, audio journals, post-it notes – and what becomes of them over time. He uses experimentation, play and restriction in his making processes through noise and unwanted sounds such record crackles and tape hiss combined with the visual equivalents of dirt, dust, decay to reveal and not conceal imperfections.

Lucy Woodhouse: Speaker Space

Lucy Woodhouse has created a DIY structure by combining various materials such as old tents, emergency blankets, and cling film. Powered using car batteries the space will house various electronic gadgets including a car stereo, a microphone, multiple speakers and a screen. Inspired while living with the community based at Braziers House, itself an ongoing experiment in cohabitation, this project’s aim is to act as an experimental self governing space for sharing, exchange and impromptu collaboration.

Lucy Woodhouse works across a variety of interactive media, online technologies, live broadcast, and photography with an interest in connectivity and co-operation often involving the people and communities she works within and around. Recent projects have involved working with public billboards, hosting audio-visual raves, developing online broadcasting work and live av performance.

LUX & CLUB DES FEMMES PRESENT THIS IS NOW: FILM AND VIDEO AFTER PUNK: THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY

THIS IS NOW: FILM AND VIDEO AFTER PUNK: THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY will be introduced by Selina Robertson and Sarah Wood, founders of Club de Femmes, and Will Fowler, curator of THIS IS NOW.

This specially curated programme focuses on work by post punk’s most provocative female filmmakers who treated the moving image like a mirror or crystal ball; a surface of divination through which to explore ideas around female subjectivity and that of the gendered viewer, evoking metaphysical journeys and challenging the limits of the body.

In the early 1980’s, clubbers, art students, new romantics and members of the post-punk scene used inexpensive, domestic technology to find new modes of expression and subvert the mainstream media. Independent VHS tapes were released; stridently bypassing censorship and Super8 film was embraced as a cheap yet distinctly lyrical and direct new medium. The DIY approach of punk was powerfully reborn.

This underground world explored the blurred lines between media and identity, creating new dialogues between the self and the world. It was an uncertain, politically contentious time, a time in which technology appeared to ease life and make things more exciting, yet also create gaps between people (much like the internet does today). Artists considered what images and technology could mean and be in their fullest sense. This period also saw new perspectives and voices emerge. More female, gay and black filmmakers pushed themselves forward, and often they were friends – squatting in flats together and enjoying the club scene, whilst developing new styles and techniques.

This programme includes particularly strong, challenging work that was originally connected to the industrial scene.

The Wound – Dir. Jill Westwood, 1984, UK, 18mins

Skinheads and Roses – Dir. Jill Westwood, 1983, UK, 7mins

The Branks – Dir. Akiko Hada, 1982, UK, 7mins

All Veneer and No Backbone – Dir. Holly Warburton, 1980-84, UK, 5mins

Winter Journey in the Hartz Mountains – Dir. Cordelia Swann, 1983, UK, 12 mins

Grayson/Flowers/Jewels – Dir. Jennifer Binnie, 1985, UK, 3mins

Shadow of a Journey – Dir. Tina Keane, 1980, UK, 19mins

Passion Triptych – Dir. Cordelia Swann, 1982, 4mins

TRT: 75mins

Club des Femmes is a queer feminist collective. We curate film screenings and events. Our mission is to offer a freed up space for the re-examination of ideas through art.

Part of the touring programme ‘This is Now: Film and Video After Punk, presented in partnership with LUX and the BFI National Archive. The UK tour has been developed with the support of the BFI, awarding funds from The National Lottery.

Image: The Wound, dir Jill Westwood, courtesy of Jill Westwood and LUX, London.

Martin Nutt

Martin is an artist who lives and works in the UK. His work is concerned with reflection, repetition, categorization and perception. Sometimes his work takes the form of text and sometimes images. It often becomes compositions for listening. Occasionally it is performed. All of his work is informed by sonic phenomena, whether present or absent. 

Martin will be presenting a realization of a text score, written in response to the study at Braziers Park.

Mary Stark: Film as Fabric (Film Material)

Film as Fabric is a film performance with optical sound summoning obsolete industries through 16mm film projection, shadow play, mechanical noise and sounds associated with the production of cloth.

Mary Stark is an artist filmmaker based at Rogue Studios in Manchester. She explores film projection as a site of wonder and imagination and is enchanted by the sculptural materiality of the filmstrip. Since 2012 Mary has been exploring ‘voices’ created from fabric, lace and thread through the filmmaking technology of optical sound. Optical sound involves visual forms in the soundtrack area of the filmstrip transforming into noise through film projection. Mary’s performances summon absent voices and obsolete industries, involving 16mm film projection, light and shadow, mechanical noise and music associated with textile production.

Matt Copson

Matt Copson is an artist born in Oxford, so this is something of a homecoming. His primary artistic concerns include (but are not limited to): staving off mortality, polluting the national discourse, replenishing electrolytes, inner conflict on a public scale, animals (rats, birds etc), red, green and blue. Some or all of these will feature in his shed commission.

MDC

Starting life as The Stains in the late-’70s, MDC – led by the perennial iconoclast and master of idealistic rage Dave Dictor, morphed into their new incarnation (who were to take on a number of guises over the years – Millions Of Dead Cops, Multi-Death Corporation, Millions Of Damn Christians being only three) with their towering classic debut of 1982. Making records for labels like Alternative Tentacles in the US and Crass Records in the UK, this inflammatory and incendiary outfit never let their ire dim throughout the ’80s, and maintain a fiercely political stance as well as a full-throttle musical attack in their current incarnation. We’re absolutely delighted to be welcoming the face-ripping righteousness of MDC to Braziers Park.

Medea

First performance at South Manchester Synagogue as part of the Wonder Women – Written In The Margins event, Medea is a soap OPERA performed by Serafina Steer and Natalie Sharp (AKA The Lone Taxidermist) based on the Greek tragedy, and bringing every part of drama and denouement that such an endeavour should demand.

Melanie Clifford: i/ii/iii

Melanie will present a work in three parts featuring observations, research and ideas formed during the residency and her experience working at previous Supernormals.

i. Dispersed Assemblage
A site-wide, distributed installation of multiple, small interconnected elements: sculpture, drawing, image and text. Quietly integrated with their surroundings across the site – in the field and trees, and at the edges of the house and outbuildings – these oft-delicate works are set to be stumbled across, with many being open to interaction and change.

ii. Very Short Film Show
A one-off live performance of moving image and sound, featuring a sequence of very short films and sound composed from aural and visual field recordings collected on-site at Braziers Park. Revealing observational vignettes and microscopic studies of the overlooked and unbeknown, the performance will feature footage and sounds collected by Melanie and collaborations with residency artists and invited musicians.

iii. Prowling
Melanie is a night owl. During the residency she sought out and discovered a delight of hidden nooks and crannies. Join her for late night adventures and unique ‘guided’ tours around the grounds of Braziers Park.

Melanie Clifford works in translation between moving image, sound, drawing, broadcast, material and site, with research interests bridging art and neuroscience. Her work includes silent film and constructing visual scores for variable sound interpretation – soliciting sensitivity to detail, to minor fluctuations and structural disintegrity. She also works directly with sound and its location: performing site-specific sound pieces and recording found sounds and her own slight interventions, to be edited, reconstructed and broadcast.

Her work is exhibited and broadcast internationally, and she co-produces a weekly live improvisational radio test transmission for Resonance 104.4FM, London.

Melanie participated in the very first Supernormal in 2010 with New Work Network’s Occupy project (and accidentally played with the A Band). At SNs2012-14 she played and developed activities with Resonance FM’s Bermuda Triangle Test Transmission Broadcast Engineers, experimenting and improvising with found objects, musicians and sounds around the site and in the Barn. At SN2013 she created a new immersive/reactive sound installation in the Pink Shed for the Women, Art & Sound Programme. At SN2014 she played glass and guitar on stage with Cindytalk and at SN2015 she volunteered.

Melting Hand

Their pedigree alone would suggest planet-altering psychedelic destruction, yet the reality outweighs the expectation when it comes to Melting Hand – comprising journeyman six-string-sorcerer Mike Vest alongside Terminal Cheesecake’s Gordon Watson and Russ Smith and Gum Takes Tooth’s Tom Fug, these vortex-voyagers take demented riff science and a skyward disposition and use ’em to lose it in a blizzard of third-eye-massaging mania.

MERZMONGO and 16mm Solar Spell (Film Material)

Nick Jordan & Lord Mongo: MERZMONGO
A live performance by Nick Jordan, Lord Mongo and The Slate Pipe Banjo Draggers, with an improvised electronic and vocal score to the expanded version of their film MERZMONGO (2016); originally made for Film is Dead, Long Live Dada festival at the ICA, celebrating 100 years of Dada.

Toots & Purrs: 16mm Solar Spell (Film Material)
Saluting the sun through fogged, scorched and solarised 16mm film with optical sound and live lens interventions.

MOONSEER

MOONSEER is a live visual and music performance composed by artist and illustrator Connie Prantera as part of her MOON series which includes MOON RA and MOON ROSE. Uniting a group of musicians with her seductive and disquiet visuals the performance tells tales of earthly wonder and ethereal relics to an ecstatic ritualistic climax within the wink of a third eye.

MOONSEER is a one-off collaboration between Conny Prantera, Eliza Bennett, Anastasia Freygang, La Horrox, Agathe Max, Joanna Pucci, Lani Rocillo, Tom Fug, Gordon Watson and a legion of visitants.

We are one
and have been many
in our many waving lives.
The moon,
among us.
The light of our bodies is the eye
and when our eye is open,
we are
full of light.

Morning Life Drawing

Fancy a creative and relaxing way to start the day? Held in the barn on Saturday and Sunday mornings with live acoustic musical accompaniment, Supernormal Nude Life Drawing sessions are for all ages and all abilities and all materials are provided.

Led by illustrator and nude figure painter Benjamin Dickson, these sessions can help to improve your drawing skills and Ben will be on offer to anyone who asks; or if you prefer, just sit back and draw! Our life drawing sessions are also an open space, so if you ever fancied having a go at life modelling yourself, you are welcome to come and try it out!

Morning Yoga

Yoga guru ‘Moses of Chelsea’ returns via California to get you high by stretching. So let’s get high together.
Also to be seen offering massages over the weekend.

Mothwasp

Taking inspiration from the radical aesthetic of experimental filmmakers Len Lye and Ken Jacobs, the playful graphic sensibility of Bruno Munari and the demise of Birmingham’s brutalist architecture, baritone guitar, intense drumming, Cage-inspired prepared piano experiments, field recordings and homemade electronics drive a visual and sonic maelstrom. With a penchant for defunct analogue media the duo explore 16mm film, tape and slide projectors in conjunction with modern digital apparatus to create live, semi-improvised, audio-responsive cinematic experiences.

Mothwasp has been selected by Supersonic as part of the City Partners Programme 2016-17.

Mums

The most intimidating and feral rock force ever to hail from Widnes, Mums deal in a fearsome demolition derby of Melvins-style riff worship, balls-to-the-wall rock ballast and an omnipresent sense of humour. No gobs remain unsmacked when this power trio are in the area.

Nathaniel Mann: The Gloaming

Nathaniel Mann is an artist, performer, composer and sound designer. Performing solo and as one third of Dead Rat Orchestra, he draws strongly on folk idioms whilst using unusual objects (including 2×4, ukulele, guitar, phonofiddle and meat cleaver!) and conventional instruments to create unique and playfully experimental music.

For Supernormal, Nathaniel Mann offers songs and sounds of and for the forest. Find him in a glade, at the gloaming. Field recordings, deconstructed folk and torchlight.

Nathaniel Mann has been selected by Oxford Contemporary Music as part of the City Partners Programme 2016-17.

NEIL CAMPBELL AND MICHAEL FLOWER

Two of the founding members of Vibracathedral Orchestra, moonlighting as a guitar/casio apocalypse party duet. Sublime sounds, ridiculous sounds. Rock’n’roll archetypes get chewed up, spat out, condensed, extended into relentless streams of broken-up ecstacy.

Next Doör

Artist Tom Railton present Next Doör, a series of landworks, or contemporary, ephemeral Geoglyphs at the festival site, resulting from air/sunlight deprivation to photosynthesis. A series of designs, shapes and sigils reflect aspects of the founding tenets of Braziers Park: creativity, community and radical educational models, from the Mythological Greek allusions of Dorothy Revel to Norman Glaister’s interest in woodcraft and work.

Tom Railton is an artist, born in Coventry and now working in London, combining a multidisciplinary practice with further exploratory making in education and community projects. In 2015 he completed the Artquest Research Residency at the Foundling Museum, and was previously featured in the inaugural St.Vincent European Art Prize, the Catlin Guide to emerging artists and the Workweek Prize.

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Night Improvisations

Sam Mcloughlin (N.Racker, samandtheplants) and David Chatton Barker (Folklore Tapes) make improvised sound sculpture and perform intuitive conjurations using primarily homemade and adapted equipment.

Using torches, screens, battery amps and a variety of other materials, Sam and David will adapt themselves to the natural environment in an unfolding night performance for people to stumble upon and interact with as they choose.

Nightfall Storytime

Nightfall Story Time provides a narrative, audio-visual experience for kids (and adults) after dark. A bit like a bedtime story, but we don’t want to suggest to anyone it is bedtime yet.

As it grows dark, stories from household tales by the brothers Grimm 1812 will be read to include; Falada the Talking Horse, The Golden Goose and Three Little Men in the Wood.

The marquee will become an animated screen for a visual feast through coloured acetates, glass, and three dimensional objects to produce a surreal puppetry response to the narrative using illustrations by Mervyn Peake as a starting point but wildly abstracting in an almost psychedelic fashion, all to the sound of percussive and conventional instruments.

Noize Choir Workshop

The Noize Choir is a performance ensemble that was formed in 2011 by Newcastle based artists Lindsay Duncanson and Marek Gabrysch. It involves a loose collective of noise enthusiasts with a common desire to use the human voice free of the traditional restraints of typical choral settings, language or musical notation. Their work is based on a shared fascination with science, culture and landscape. They indulge in phenomenological explorations of museum collections, or imaginings of our geological past. Replicating and experimenting with the sound of machines or the natural world, Noize Choir continually find ways to push and pull the idea of what a choir can be.

Noize Choir have composed and performed in French churches and on Austrian radio, at the Baltic Centre for contemporary arts, The Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle Upon Tyne, and the Grade II listed Preston Bus station.

Normil Hawaiians

NORMIL HAWAIIANS have always operated as a collective of musicians rather than a band per se and for their third album, ‘Return Of The Ranters’, the group comprised of Guy Smith, Simon Marchant, Alun ‘Wilf’ Williams, Noel Blanden and Jimmy Miller. Recorded at Dave Anderson’s Foel studio in Wales (sonic home of Amon Düül II and Hawkwind) in the Winter of 1985, a time and a place triangulated from political, social and geographical aspects, the album extended their free experiments in compelling arrhythmia and seemingly organised sound, taking a loose trajectory from their previous albums and earlier, more confrontational approach.

Lucid, candid, politically engaged, rarely metronomic but always humane, tired but still fighting, Normil Hawaiians’ have waited patiently for thirty years. ‘Return of The Ranters’ was not released back in 1985 as with Guy, Jimmy and Wilf living in squatting communities in South London, and Simon and Noel re-locating their families to rural Kent – the Family Hawaii splintered and went its separate ways. In the intervening years, the band’s reputation has grown considerably, far beyond the UK. With vast clouds of atmosphere, tape loops, found percussion, exalted synths and walls of guitar ambience, Normil Hawaiians sound more at home today.

They have been selected by Upset The Rhythm (London) as part of the City Partners Programme 2016-17.

Open Music Archive

Artists Eileen Simpson and Ben White work at the intersection of art, music and information networks. Open Music Archive is their ongoing project to distribute out-of-copyright archive material and to spark collaborative activity through exhibitions, films and live events.

Eileen and Ben will be giving a presentation in the new Vortex space that presents a new audio work commissioned for Kaleidoscope, at Modern Art Oxford, as part of their 50th Anniversary celebrations, alongside recent Open Music Archive projects.

Open Music Archive have been selected by Modern Art Oxford as part of the City Partners Programme 2016-17.

Pester and Rossi

Grounded in sculptural performance, Pester and Rossi create live works that explore social behavior and interaction, often employing outlandish DIY costumes, props, visual puns, irony, bawdiness and satire to to challenge conventional perceptions of the everyday.

They explore the duality between their bodies, as objects, and their relationships with/to a particular site, often building temporary structures and wearable sculpture, that they must negotiate within; setting themselves boundaries and limitations with regards to the body, sexuality, social norms and rituals.

As well as being part of the Artist Shed Commissions, the duo will be running a costume making workshop during the weekend, plus look out for a special one-off performance from Fallopé & the Tubes…

Pester and Rossi: costume making workshop

Find Pester and Rossi’s shed and get involved with making outlandish DIY costumes and props with the duo, which may result in potential collective conga around the site…

Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs

The hardy toon terrors have left many a smouldering husk of a venue in their wake in the last couple of years, delivering feverish and transgressive blasts of psych-drone dementia and riff-driven salvation that summon an almighty primal charge in all they survey. Indeed, these psychic omnivores will consume a total of seven times almost anything you put them into contact with.

PunkSeq10

Specialist sound workshops with Farmer Glitch & Eastville Project Space.

PunkSeq10 combining a 10 step sequencer and an Atari Punk Console for glitchy grooves. Great project for those with previous soldering experience. This consists of a distorted-noise machine – being driven by a step-sequencer – allowing either 4, 8 or 10 steps – build it, stick the battery in for industrial techno-fun …

Workshop is £20 – all materials will be provided, and participants will be able to keep the synths upon completion of the sessions.

Places are limited to 10 people per session, so book your place ahead of the festival by contacting: [email protected]

Eastville Project Space is an independent art space in Yeovil, Somerset – providing a creative hub for collaboration, where artists, musicians, designers and hackers can develop and produce innovative projects, with a programme including commissions, residencies, events and workshops.

Rattle

Rattle focus almost exclusively on drums and more drums, beneath a delicate overlay of vocal harmonies and percussive effects. Formed by Katharine Eira Brown (also of Kogumaza) and Theresa Wrigley (also of Fists), Rattle began as an experiment in crafting rich songs and melody using drums and voice alone. Their music weaves and intertwines post-punk, minimalism and experimental rock, through off-kilter rhythms, patterns and counter melodies.

Rattle have been selected by Upset The Rhythm (London) as part of the City Partners Programme 2016-17.

Image by Simon Parfrement.

Rebecca Lennon

During the Supernormal residency Rebecca Lennon conducted a number of interviews with community members at Braziers Park, including Fede who looks after the beehives. Rebecca now presents a new video inspired by the ‘waggle dance’, the democratic communication of a beehive.

Weaving together footage of her time at Braziers: the movement of bees, conversations, gestures and architecture into a rhythmical assemblage, the video is a geometric portrait of a community, and a study of the waggle dance as a choreography.

Working with video, text, sound and performance, Rebecca Lennon brings together the cinematic with the mundane, the spiritual with the bureaucratic. Exotic desire, cartoon violence, debt, history and domestic fetishism are combined in absurd spectacles, narratives and instructional texts.

Safehouse Open Improv

Safehouse Collective’s improvisation night has been running in Brighton for over ten years. The format they have used from day one is simple – four names are drawn from a hat and a ten minute-or-so improvisation ensues – but it throws up such endlessly intriguing results that they have stuck with it!

Last year’s session at the Barn was a spirited affair so they’re back again for more. There will be percussion, and drum kit and electronics set up to be played, but do bring along your own instruments if you can – the more variety of sounds the better. Amps are provided.

There are a few rules to note: adjust your volume to that of the quietest instrument in the quartet; only play when your name is drawn; treat borrowed instruments with respect. The most important rule though is to not know what you are going to do until you start doing it.

Sam Belinfante and Mark Sanders

Sam Belinfante is an artist based in London whose practice explores audio-visual technologies and their corresponding modes of thought. Belinfante recently completed a three-month residency at Camden Arts Centre to ‘unpick the relationships between the choreography of sound, language and technology’.

Belinfante’s research moves between sound, music and gesture, the choreography of the sensory experience and language and gesture within the choral tradition. Upon culmination of the residency and as a way of ‘working through’ the accumulated research and audio-visual material, Belinfante invited acclaimed percussionist Mark Sanders to respond to a series of signals, both voluntarily and involuntarily, within an installation of sound, looping gestures and moving image created by the artist.

In the context of Supernormal, Belinfante and Sanders will reconfigure the performance within the festival’s unique spaces contributing further to the project’s growing set of convolutions.

Image: Postscript: Sam Belinfante: On the One Hand and the Other, Camden Arts Centre, 2016. Photo: Hydar Dewachi.

Sam Weaver & Rachel Goodyear

For Supernormal, electroacoustic musician Sam Weaver and visual artist Rachel Goodyear will perform a live music and visual art experience that has developed directly from ‘A Line Fractured into a Thousand Aberrations’, the 4th Samarbeta music residency they originally collaborated on at Islington Mill in July-August 2015.

For Samarbeta 4, Sam Weaver, whose work lies in the grey areas between acousmatic music, free improvisation and experimental electronics, often exploring ways to bring moments of calm and harmony out of passages of chaos, invited national and international musicians to take part in ‘A Line Fractures into a Thousand Aberrations’, a residency with collaboration and improvisation at its core. Beginning with a skeletal framework of scores, markers and directions, Weaver set off a collaborative relay while Goodyear interpreted these directions into artworks of drawings, painting and collage, from which the musicians read and transformed into music. Each stage offered openness for all involved to open up a dialogue into alternative ways of transferring visual into aural.

Performing alongside Rachel who will be doing live painting & Sam will be:
Kelly Jayne Jones (flute, tapes, electronics) – (Part Wild Horses Mane On Both Sides)
Daniel Weaver (Birdcage, Bowed Metal & Other Devices) – (Stock, Hausen & Walkman)

& free improvising players
Otto Wilberg(Double Bass)
Ecka Mordecai (Cello)
Greta Buitkute (Voice)
And other special guests……

Sam Weaver and Rachel Goodyear have been selected by Islington Mill / Fat Out as part of the City Partners Programme 2016-17.

Second Supernormal Super Sensory Summer School [SSSSSS] WOODHENGE

Supernormal Super Sensory Summer School make a typically awe-inspiring return in what can only be described as a ‘Wood Henge’ structure, with everything from ‘post-human’ discourses to Kibbo Kift inspired ceremonial design and craft on offer to get involved in. Join SSSSSS on the field at ‘Woodhenge’ for further Super Sensory workshops, talks and seminars including: thinking beyond the ‘human’, Spirit names and guides, ‘posthuman’ dis-courses, Playing with masks, exploring song & collective consciousness, Kibbo kift inspired design and making, mimicking the ‘natural’, ‘Prehistoric’ mind/thinking and SciFi adven-turers inspiring new worlds. SSSSSS will be joined by special guests Plastique Fantastique, AAS, Annebella Pollen, and more.

Friday, 3pm-7pm:

Super Sensory Spirit Mask-making Workshop (Charlie Fox & SSSSSS Team))
What is your power animal? Dream of spirit animals? Then bring the beast with you to this open workshop to construct your own spirit mask. Prepare to join the SSSSSS Sing-out experience on Sunday and connect yourself to your spirit animal.
We have mask materials and making stuff but feel free to supersensory im-provise.

Dr Shaman’s Jellyworm Pecking Order (Chris Hinds)
Exploring the woods with beak and feathers..

20:44 PM start (sunset) and staying together until 21:50 (moonset):
‘Meditation on Ugly Feelings for the Purposes of Political and Aesthetic Subversion’ (Margareta Kern)

Sitting quietly together, suspending all action for 30 minutes (or longer if you wish) at sunset, sunrise, moonset and moonrise (please see the time-table below, bring something comfortable to sit or lie on). Ugly Feelings is in-spired/refers to a book by Sianne Ngai of the same title, in which she speaks of non-cathartic states of feeling associated with situations in which action is blocked or suspended – her book explores the political and aesthetic potential of such affective states. Continues on Saturday, morning: start 5:36 AM for 30 minutes (sunrise) and evening: start at 9:36 AM for 30 minutes (moonrise)

Saturday:

5:36 start AM for 30 minutes (sunrise)
9:36 start AM for 30 minutes (moonrise)
‘Meditation on Ugly Feelings for the Purposes of Political and Aesthetic Subversion’ (Margareta Kern)

11am: ‘Meet the Woodcraft Folk’ (Martin Pover)
An introduction to the woodcraft folk with games, craft and song..

12noon: ‘SuperSensory! An Introduction’ (Anne Robinson)

Why SuperSensory? and why Supernormal? What is going on now? An intro-duction to the origins of Supernormal, Integrative Research and Braziers: fol-lowing some leads and making connections..

1pm: ‘Woodhex Henge it’ (Charlie Fox)

Offers a brief journey into the prehistory of Henges, solastro-archaeology and the supermetaphysicall scribing of Lunar Module Earthrise William Anders. This talk and workshop will speak to the making of earthwise spirit masks.

2pm: ‘The art and magic of the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift’ (Dr Annabella Pollen, author of ‘The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift: Intellectual Barbarians’)

Author and curator Annebella Pollen introduces the woodland rebels of the 1920s. Talk and discussion followed by Kibbo Kift symbol-making.

3.15pm ‘Antiuniversity Now: Shifting Authority Workshop’ (Kerri and Shiri from Antiuniversity Now)

A discussion led by Antiuniversity Now – collaborative experiment to revisit and reimagine the 1968 Antiuniversity of London which had links with Bra-ziers Park

4.30 ‘An introduction to Holectics, with AAS’

AAS talk through some of the key aspects of their research into holectics and its potential applications. With practical and participatory demonstration.

6pm: ‘Hearphones’ (Karina Townsend)

The Supersensory ears of the festival: find new ways of listening with conducted sound walks, ear trumpeted sonic exploratories, enhanced audio perceptions and the ‘listening post’!

20:42 PM start (sunset) and stay together until 22:14 (moonset).
‘Meditation on Ugly Feelings for the Purposes of Political and Aesthetic Subversion’ (Margareta Kern)

Sunday:

12noon: ‘Pick up Sticks’ (Aggie Forster)

Wood and co-operative play!

1pm: Karry On Kibbo Kift!

More making of masks, symbols and songs..

2pm – ‘Hearphones’ Karina Townsend)

Find new ways of listening in the supersensory ears of the festival..

3pm: ‘The Super Sensory Open Discussion’ with artists from the Supernormal residency at Braziers Park and others on integrative research and super sensory being

4pm: ‘Voice Workshop for SSSSSSing-Out’ (Anne Robinson and the SSSSS Team)

4.30 pm: ‘The Supernormal Supersensory Summer School Sing-Out’

The procession of the animals – all welcome

PLUS:

a programme of films at Braziers House (check main programme for opening hours):

‘Supernormal and the Super Sensory Summer School 2015’ edited by John Cousins
SQRRL by John Russell
‘SSSSSSing-Out in the Park with Bermondsey Artists and the AntiUniversity’ edited by Anne Robinson
‘Green Skeen’ by Plastique Fantastique
‘Curtain’ Call’ film with the BIAW by Keran James
‘Sigma’ filmed at Braziers in 1964

plus additional films and extracts at The Vortex – check main Supernormal programme for details!

Serena Korda: The Jug Choir: Ectoplasmic Variations

Serena Korda’s Jug Choir: Ectoplasmic Variations explores the materiality of object and sound drawing on a rich history of jugs being used as musical instruments, from country blues jug bands to the psychedelic rock of the 13th Floor Elevators. Each ceramic vessel bears the face of a bearded man, referencing Bellermine Jugs of the 16th century that were used as common household objects. During the Witch Hunts of the 17th Century these jugs were transformed into ‘Witches Bottles’, a form of sympathetic magic used to ward off evil. A kind of voodoo ensued as the body of the male vessel was filled with urine, bent nails and votive cloth hearts, hoping to cause pain to any ‘witch’ that posed a threat. The Jug Choir uses the ‘Witches Bottles’ as a vehicle to explore notions of gender and hysteria through the lens of war. This insurgent army’s sonic journey considers how ritual is embedded in acts of violence.

Serena Korda works through large-scale ensemble performances, film and sculpture to examine the secret life of objects and our latent desire to find pleasure in fear. Underpinning her practice is a search to find and highlight ritual in the everyday developed through encounters, conversations and the researching of abandoned histories. Audiences are often encouraged to participate at some point in her process creating collective experiences that often focus on the forgotten and overlooked.

Jug Choir: Ectoplasmic Variations will be open as an exhibition in the Drawing Room at Braziers during the day and the jugs will come alive through an expanded choir at 5pm on Saturday and Sunday.

Serena Korda has been selected by G39 as part of the City Partners Programme 2016-17.

Sophie Cooper & Delphine Dora

France’s Delphine Dora and England’s Sophie Cooper have both been making music individually over the past decade and have come together for this unique collaboration using piano, trombone and wordless vocals. Last year they released an album called Distance Future on the Yorkshire based “Was ist Das?” label and it appeared on both The Quietus and Pitchfork’s end of year lists.

Their album DISTANCE FUTURE is their first collaboration from the highlights of a very creative session in the setting of Todmorden Unitarian Church and they also both appeared separately on Richard Moult’s album “Last Night I Dreamt of Hibrihteselle”. Sophie and Delphine are caught here carrying out primal improvisations utilising the profound acoustics of this historic chapel.

Sophie Cooper & Julian Bradley

Separated by Lancashire-West Yorkshire boundary, Sophie Cooper and Julian Bradley have recently embarked on a new distance duo for performance at this year’s Supernormal Festival. A release is also in the works as a result of this project.

Julian Bradley is a founder member of Vibracathedral Orchestra, solo as The Piss Superstition, in Never Rad with Luke Poot, and a past member of The Negative Kite. His sound has been described as intricate electronic calligraphy produced by malfunctioning effects units, tapes and guitar.

In collaboration with Sophie Cooper, a musician interested in reimagining the conventions of song writing through incorporation of drones, weird noises and alternative vocal approaches, the duo have created a series of pieces where fuzztone and feedback patterns pulsate, sweet vocal lines play with repetition and a sense of maximalism is achieved.

Sound Hoppers

SoundHoppers sessions encourage children to engage in a deep listening experience through a nuanced and sensitive approach. Various engaging listening exercises are used as a playful means to explore various aspects of sound – be it proximity (i.e. how far or close a sound is), timbre (i.e. the tonality and type of sound), or volume (i.e. how loud or quiet a sound is). Children will be encouraged to explore and play with specially constructed “Sound boxes” – resonant chambers containing everyday objects that can be used to create an infinite variety of sounds.

SoundHoppers is facilitated by Wajid Yaseen and Helen Frosi (SoundFjord), an artist and curator duo both specialising in sound art and musical practices, who are passionate about creative engagement and education through sound and play.

Speak Your Brains

Are you interesting? Are you interested in something? Would you like to spend 10-15 minutes telling Supernormal something interesting?

We are looking for (interesting) speakers, from within the Supernormal ranks. Whether you are a ticket buyer, performer or volunteer we want to hear from you.

Talks can be about absolutely anything. Speak enthusiastically and Supernormal will listen.

PowerPoint optional. Props encouraged.

If you’re interested in speaking, email [email protected] with a brief outline of your subject.

Spike Associates: The Do Nothing Club

A mind cleaning space
A place where the word “application” is forbidden
No more deadlines
Fight capitalism, do nothing
Be a Superhero, do nothing
Are you tired of the pressure of always having to do something?
At the ‘Do Nothing Club’ we do time differently

Spike Associate members Alessio Mazzaro and Fiona Winning create a space in the woods where people can join them to become somebody else and gain superpowers to do nothing as an antidote to hyper productivity, away from the constraints of relentless working, networking and writing endless applications.

Spike Associates is a membership network of artists, writers, curators, designers and other creative practitioners. Built on a culture of collaboration and experimentation, the group offers a dynamic context for the development of individual practices by facilitating new connections, hosting critical discussions and supporting ambitious projects.

SSSSS Film Screenings

An SSSSS programme of selected films, additions and extracts, including:

‘Supernormal and the Super Sensory Summer School 2015’ edited by John Cussans
‘SSSSSSing-Out in the Park with Bermondsey Artists and the AntiUniversity’ edited by Anne Robinson
‘Green Skeen’ by Plastique Fantastique
‘Curtain’ Call’ film with the BIAW by Keran James
‘Sigma’ filmed at Braziers in 1964
‘SQRRL’ by John Russell

SURREAL SKIN DECORATOR

This is not face painting as you know it. There will be no butterflies, tigers or ‘pretty’ there is no time frame just the twilight zone of 4 dimensional skin art. Surreal disco skin decorator Natalie Sharp invites you to spin the wheel of (mis)fortune to discover your antipodean character – from monochrome galaxy to psychedelic amphibian from outer to inner space.

Talkaoke

Talkaoke is a spontaneous, pop-up talk-show set around the unique ‘Talkaoke Table’ set up for engaging people in an interactive participant-led discussion to find out what’s on people’s minds around the ‘UFO’ of chat.

Whether it’s the state of society that’s bothering you, a gripe about your festival camping neighbour, or maybe you’re just down-right delighted about something and want to tell the world, Talkaoke hosts invite you in for a lively, debate to unearth the nitty gritty of peoples inner rage or delight.

Tasos Stamou

Over the last decade, Tasos Stamou has developed a unique style of live electroacoustic composition. Long, continuous pieces crafted live on stage from a formidable arsenal of zither, reeds, recorders, modular synthesizers, loopers, handmade electronics and more.

The Cush

Hailing from Forth Worth Texas, The Cush are exponents of a widescreen sweep of sound that alternately offers succour to the weary and haunts the dreams. Languid and duskily charismatic, these atmospheric serenades nod to thepsychedelia of their Texan tradition, the torch songs of country and the heat-haze of shoe gaze, whilst maintaining a mystical magnetism all this band’s own. New Magic In A Dusty World.

The Early Years

Bonding over a love for the krautrock of the ’70s and a far-reaching experimental mindset, The Early Years arrived from East London in the mid-noughties, and their career thus far has seen only one album of motorik magnificence amidst hiatuses aplenty. Yet now they’re apparently back for good, with a new album in the pipeline that seems set to re-establishes them as one of the nation’s foremost exponents of head-spinning repetition and heavy-lidded cool.

The Ex

We’re delighted to welcome the Dutch iconoclastic institution The Ex to Braziers Park this year, especially with their being true keepers of the spirit of adventure, mischief and innovation which we’ve always held as important in the running of this event. A band forged from punk rock, yet existing outside of any convenient pigeonholing, their minimal approach, no-barriers opposition to any for of orthodoxy and DIY ethos are an endless wellspring of inspiration, and we can’t wait to see them set fire to the place as only they know how.

“An Ex show is a shared experience, they take the audience on a musical adventure to places no one has been before. They are the most interesting musical unit in the world today…Go and see the Ex and you will hear rhythms you have never heard before…a sweaty seething party, an uplifting, joyful celebration. They have brilliantly proved that playing music with this sense of wild-eyed fun and radical political edge and this adherence to all that was good and great about the positive politic of the punk and post punk period can actually fucking work” – The Quietus

The Irrational Film Jam

The return of the Irrational Film Jam…
Late night cinematic marvels in the Vortex after midnight each evening as we present a selection of the bizarre, occult and mysterious films for your delectation etc.. and anyone who fancies making some sound to ramp up the suspense should turn up with instruments or percussion (acoustic only!) at midnight sharp.

The Lowest Form

Gnarled, kaleidoscopic and confrontational hardcore miscreants, including Michael Kasparis of Apostille and Luke Younger of Helm, who have been described as “an aural obstacle course of thuggish pounding and piercing feedback wash…I want to bash my brains out, bleed all over your drugs and watch you smoke ’em up as I drift off to the inevitable.” We can’t really argue with that, can you?

The Neighbours are Bats

Combining the contexts of a summer music festival and a country park, The Neighbours are Bats uses recordings made using a bat detector to imagine a ‘bat band’, in which five common British bat species become five band members. Echolocation calls are freed from the task of catching insects and the calls of each species are built into instruments that can be played in a jam session.

With guidance from resident bats, audiences are invited to don a bat costume and join in a jam session. With bat calls’ resemblance to synth sounds, from percussive and rhythmic to trilling and bleeping, a noisy and multi-layered soundscape is created, varying and evolving as participants come and go.

The Pink Shed Take Over: Eastville Project Space

Inside the Shed: ‘How We Communicate’ an installation by Simon Blackmore
Simon Blackmore makes performative sculptures and installations using sound and custom-made technology. He is also a founding member of the art group Owl Project. Known for their distinctive range of wooden musical and sculptural instruments.

For Supernormal Simon will show a new sound installation called “How we Communicate”. Developed at Eastville Project Space in collaboration with local singers, the work explores using human voice to transmit digital information across the Pink Shed.The work utilises directional speakers, parabolic microphones and displays to mimic how computers send and receive information.

Afternoon Workshops and Talks
Confirmed so far:
Talk: Tim Hill presents ‘The Island of Noise’ (an anti-lecture)- exploring the British love of noise, how we use it in celebration and ritual and some of the roots of modern noise making.

Workshop: family noise workshops/carnival, with songs and chants about noise, junk instruments kazoos etc

More to be announced shortly …..

Afternoon/Evening Collaborative Performances
Eastville will be hosting an intimate performance space around the Pink Shed, encouraging collaboration and additional performances from various artists appearing at this years Supernormal. More details to follow – final running order and artists will be announced throughout the festival.

Evening Film/Moving Image Events:
After dark – the Pink Shed will become an intimate venue for film screenings/performances. Full program to follow …

Morning Therapy Sessions – The ASMR Parlour
Enter the ASMR Parlour and experience an ear-tingling pleasure of your choice. The perfect way to relax and rejuvenate tired ears. Our treatments are delivered on an individual basis, giving you an intimate, tailored ASMR experience that will excite your receptors and relax your mind.
Professional micro-rummagers Henry and Robin are trained in the delicate art of Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response therapy. Select from a range of YouTube’s favourite ASMR triggers, or we will endeavour to work with you to deliver your dream bespoke treatment.
Find out what makes us the number one choice in live ASMR therapy today.

Eastville Project Space is an independent art space in Yeovil, Somerset – providing a creative hub for collaboration, where artists, musicians, designers and hackers can develop and produce innovative projects. Their programme includes commissions, residencies, events and workshops.

The Quietus in Conversation: On Collaboration

Cerebral stimulation in the form of a panel discussion exploring what it means to collaborate, chaired by Robert Barry from the Quietus – our long-term partners and the sharpest music website on the block.

Panel artists are: Sam Underwood & Sam Cook, Sophie Cooper & Delphine Dora and Sam Belifante who will all be presenting collaborative performances at the festival.

The Rebel

The Rebel is an artist, musician and poet based in London whose unique performances draw on his incredible talent for humorous, meaningful and provocative wordplay. He has cranked out albums since 1989 and has worked in many guises including the frontman, guitarist, vocalist and songwriter for the band Country Teasers, a Scottish art punk band formed in 1993. A recent appearance as part of Dan Mitchell’s exhibition “Alcoholism” at Celine Gallery in Glasgow saw The Rebel suspended in mid-air to perform the entirety of Anti, the new album by Rihanna and Pink Floyd’s the final cut, the seventies monster-Rock band’s hilarious last album before an acrimonious split saw the monstrous rock outfit lumbering off in separate directions. Rihanna on the other hand goes from strength to strength, building on the wicked opening-closing hi-hat sound on “Umbrella” to fulfill the unique promise of this astonishing Barbadian, whose formative years were in fact spent on the boardwalk empires of Manchester Piccadilly, if you can believe that!…

The SamSam Big Band

In honour of The Pig and The Dirtpipe – as created during the residency – Sam Underwood and Sam Cook have been working together (remotely) following the residency and in the run up to Supernormal to build a selection of weird and wonderful musical instruments that will tour the festival site with a series of impromptu performances; recruiting extra members as necessary.

Mr.Underwood is a musician, sound artist and instrument designer. As well as being a music producer and live performer Mr.Underwood is often found working on a variety of leftfield projects, from setting up elaborate field recordings, to building obscure mechanical musical instruments. He has an almost unhealthy fascination with sound, often being distracted by a squeaky shoe or the sound of the ventilation system when he should be concentrating on something else. Mr.Underwood also can’t help but twist the uses of objects, to find new ways of creating sound and interfaces with instruments and technology. A hacker at heart. He can be found popping up in various guises at gigs, events and lectures.

Sam Cook studied in London but soon became bored and deflated by the city and the on-going brutal and rapid gentrification of important cultural communities. He moved to Glasgow to study at the Art School in 2014 and has since been brewing beer at his South-side flat, cooking and sharing food amongst others and dragging unwanted matter across the city. His work explores the synthesis between social and environmental sustainability and manifests in multiple forms including collective activity, installation and sculpture.

This Place I Found

This Place I Found is a workshop to introduce people to mindful, observational and non-judgemental writing. Participants will to go off around the site of Braziers Park armed only with paper and pen to write short texts in a location of their choice, to review, notice and observe ones surroundings to encourage a sense of being in a place just as it is.

Tomaga

Deploying a fearlessly experimental, improvisatory onslaught of abstract electronica and propulsive rhythmic drive, Tomaga’s eerie analogue chills hark back to the ghosts of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, whilst drum tattoos engage with an intensity and invention of Jaki Liebezeit proportions. In an era in which all too many contemporary combos seem to equate a krautrock influence with yet another trip down the motorik Tomaga are possessed of a sonic brinksmanship and questing nature far closer to West Berlin’s original spirit.

TRANSparent KINOmar

A KIDS KINO PROJECT to get young ones and elders together and pow wow.
The Cube’s KKP has taken cinema experiences to Haiti, Nepal and Dunkirk in a humanitarian response to earthquakes and major civic disruptions. Over the festival we going to do some thinking, talking, filming and remote viewing.

How does film help restore some goodwill? Can KKP make cultural exchanges when people are fighting to surivive? Why do kids worldwide love ‘The Red Ballon’….and how do you make a cinema? Over a series of playful sessions KKP explores what the hell we can do together as we look under the cine-skin.

Saturday – 10am – Midday / BRAINSTORMING
Kids, please roll up and into action. This morning we get the KKP projector and soundsystem whirring, showing clips from KKP projects, short films and have a think tank. Today we can decide on future KKP projects and discuss the merits of Chaplin, cartoons and non-verbal cinema amongst other tricks of the light.

Saturday – 5.30pm / no LIGHTS, some CAMERAS, lots of ACTION (meet at Vortex)
Welcome, actors, directors, dancers and acrobats…we going make a KKP film in MASKS. So cover your faces and come along. ALL welcome.

Sunday – 4pm / INTO THE WOODS (meet at Vortex)
Build your own micro-cinema. Join the KKP team to build a cinema in the woods, then watch the films made over the festival plus a special screening.

Turtle Yama

Turtle Yama were formed in 2015 by performance artist and guitarist Yuko Kureyama (formerly of ‘Water Fai’) and electronic keyboard player Nahoko Kamei (formerly played with Urichipangoon). Their new collaborative project Turtle Yama combines both artists talents through electronica, tape loops and improvised keyboard weaving incongruous stories together to surprise and intrigue. This will be Turtle Yama’s debut performance in the UK, and the first chance for audiences to experience their truly innovative music within a rural Oxfordshire setting.

This performance is supported by funding from Sasakawa Foundation.

Turtle Yama Warashi

A new collaborative performance between Yoshino Shigihara (Yama Warashi) and Turtle Yama.

UK based Japanese artist Yoshino Shigihara’s (formerly of Zun Zun Egui)new solo project Yama Warashi is inspired by Japanese folk dance music, Bon Odori(盆踊り), free jazz and African music with electric psychedelia. Yoshino sings partially in her mother tongue about mycelium, nuclear power and broken O.Yama Warashi (山童).

Turtle Yama was formed in 2015 by performance artist and guitarist Yuko Kureyama (formerly of ‘Water Fai’) and electronic keyboard player Nahoko Kamei (formerly played with Urichipangoon). Their new collaborative project Turtle Yama combines both artists talents through electronica, tape loops and improvised keyboard weaving incongruous stories together to surprise and intrigue. This will be Turtle Yama’s debut performance in the UK.

This performance is supported with funding from Sasakawa Foundation.

Tut Vu Vu

Tut Vu Vu are Matthew Black, Jamie Bolland and Raydale Dower. They released their self-titled 12″ vinyl debut album on VaVa Records April 2015.

Drawing on a wide range of influences and defying easy categorisation, they have incorrectly been referred to as: ‘musique concrète’, ‘arguably the best band in Glasgow’,‘vaguely jazz based rhythm with a wayward electronic disposition’ or ‘the love child of David Lynch and Anaïs Nin’…

Urthona

Drone meditations and Blakeian revelations from the tor tops courtesy of the West Country’s foremost exponents of tectonic vibrations made manifest across the ether.

Vibracathedral Orchestra

Vibracathedral Orchestra have been kicking out the jams in a variety of forms since the late 1990s. They specialise in long-form improvisation, often built around drones and extended rhythmic workouts. Typically, their instrumentation comprises a wide variety of string, wind, electronic and percussive elements – truly orchestral, but heavy on ramshackle homebrewed punk expediency. Commentators have compared their sound variously to krautrock, folk, free jazz, early music, noise and The Velvet Underground, and while there may be some truth in some of these comparisons, their sound and methods are entirely their own. The current line-up comprises long-time members Adam Davenport, Bridget Hayden, John Godbert, Julian Bradley, Michael Flower and Neil Campbell. Playing live infrequently these days, their Supernormal set will be a rare chance to catch them in their full-blown long-ass natural glory.

WARP / G39 – In Response

Wales Artist Resource Programme (WARP) is based in G39 art space in Cardiff and provides professional development resources, mentoring and guidance for artists. The space serves as a drop-in centre and library for artists through an ongoing programme of peer-to-peer and one-to-one sessions giving artists the opportunity to talk about their practice with gallery staff, and offers seminars and artist talks about different modes of contemporary practice.

WARP members Neasa Terry, Sam Perry and Yvonne Lake have been selected to attend Supernormal to collectively and individually respond to the arts, projects and activities programme through a variety of textual mediums.

Part of the partners project.

Water

Water are a five-piece sonic and visual group that formed in Manchester in March 2015, now based at Islington Mill, Salford. They comprise a heady mix of artists, poets and musicians and performers who’ve come together to create ritualistic encounters which engulf the senses.

Wild Bunch DJ’s

Wild Bunch is a clubnight run by people with learning difficulties for everyone who have come back to play a high jinx set of bangers at Supernormal each year.

Clubs for people with learning disabilities had often been old style social clubs, where you play table tennis or go bowling, and people wanted a more adult night out, A club where it was OK to have a drink, chat up a potential girlfriend/boyfriend, gossip in the loos, try out the latest sexy dance moves, and generally go “wild”!

The Wild Bunch has become tremendously popular, now attracting 250+ people to each gig holding nights at Sadlers Wells, hosting their own marquee at the Tottenham Festival and having played at pretty much every Supernormal festival since the start, it just wouldn’t be the same without Wild Bunch playing out some high NRG ‘bangers’ to dance the afternoon away to!

Wytch Hazel

A heroic combination of folk-tinged heraldry, twin-guitar harmony magic and NWOBHM-inspired exuberance, Wytch Hazel inhabit a mystical realm entirely of their own creation. This Lancastrian four-piece’s style is inspired not only by the mighty clangour of Wishbone Ash and Thin Lizzy, but the sacred medieval influences of David Munrow’s Early Music Consort Of London, resulting in a band truly out of time and ready to blow minds in singular and effortlessly refreshing fashion.

Yama Warashi (山童).

Formerly of Bristol-based outfit Zun Zun Egui, Yoshino Shigihara hereby embarks on Yama Warashi (山童). a solo project, inspired by Japanese folk dance music, Bon Odori(盆踊り), free jazz and African music with electric psychedelia. Yoshino sings partially in her mother tongue about mycelium, nuclear power and broken O.

Young Women’s Music Project

The Young Women’s Music Project (YWMP) is an educational charity that offers free music workshops for women aged 14-21, which provide an inclusive and supportive space for young women to make music together, learn new skills, express themselves, and grow in confidence.

People experience the world we live in in different ways. Understanding this is key to knowing the difficulties faced by the marginalised in society. By empowering those whose voices are not usually heard, we can start to make a change. The young women of YWMP will respond to Supernormal and draw on their own personal experiences to create a wall of images inspired by the festival around them and what it means to them.

[Super] Common Press

Taking place from a Pink Milk Float, [Super] Common Press is an open-printing-press dedicated to producing music ephemera for the festival and beyond. Bootleg cassette inlays, lyric booklets, posters announcing gigs of the day (planned or impromptu), artwork for newly formed bands, LP fanzine inserts, poetry/zines/manifestos…… Destroy your idols.

Open to all, they will provide free access, teaching and assistance to those interested in printmaking/printing for a sound-cause. Featuring woodblocks, linocuts, stencils, risograph printing and soya ink.

Richard Lawrence is Printmaker and printer with 30 years of experience. Based in Oxford, former workplaces include Oxford University Press and Bath Artists’ Studios (formerly Widcombe Studios.

Dario Utreras is book designer and printer based in Oxford, founder of Commonbook(s) – a design and printing alliance for local and social causes (common press) and a publishing press of artists books from Latin America (acacias).

Antonia Stringer is an Illustrator and printer. Based in London, independent publisher of own comics and visual essays. Studio member of Hato Press, a risograph printing house.

Special projects will also happen onsite by:
Ian Heames (Face Press)
Eleanor Von Brown (X Marks the Bokship)