Supersonic Festival 2024, Birmingham review - another fine musical celebration far away from the mainstream

I’ve been a regular attender of the Supersonic Festival for about 15 years and much has changed in that time. When I first rocked up to see Swans, Stinky Wizzleteat, PCM and other sonic treats, the event was a bit of a white boys’ club, both in terms of the artists and the audience, despite being put together and curated by a couple of women.

Since then, there has been a major effort to decolonise the line-up and bring in many more explicitly non-Western, female and LGBT+ artists, adding new sounds and textures, while remaining resolutely outside the mainstream. So, it was surprising to come across the audience at Supersonic on Friday, which was pretty much 80% white, male and middle-aged (adjectives that are all totally appropriate to describe this writer). They also tended to be either dressed in the wholly black, clichéd uniform of the musical outsider, or even less glamorously. Radio 6 Dads, basically. By Saturday and for the whole of the rest of the festival, however, this had changed significantly, and the crowd was looking considerably more diverse – certainly in relation to the gender mix of those present, but also ethnically and in terms of sexuality. That said, there weren’t many people under the age of 30 around at any point during the weekend.

Nevertheless, the Supersonic team pulled off another blinder in 2024 and, as Bonnie “Prince” Billy proclaimed during his headline set on Sunday: “I hope that you’re all enjoying this weekend – because there’s absolutely no excuse not to.”

Friday

The first day of Supersonic 2024 hit the ground running with the woozy fever dream of Gazelle Twin’s (pictured below by Robert Barrett) latest production, Black Dog. Largely performed from and around an armchair and standard lamp, surrounded by various pedals, switches and buttons, Elizabeth Bernholz held court dressed in a shiny green baggy trouser suit with shoulder pads, rather than as the mischievous sprite from her last visit to Supersonic. Her Electro-Goth art performance emerged from horror movie soundtrack territory, with slow and occasionally meandering, grinding industrial grooves accompanied by whispers and growls that often had a strange Victorian nursery rhyme quality.

This was soon followed by something that was considerably more straight forward, as The None hit the stage with some blistering post-punk tunes. So new is this band, that included Kaila Whyte from local heroes Youth Man and members of Bloc Party, Cassels and Frauds, that they’d only released their first EP one day before. As Whyte said, while striding around the front of the stage: “You won’t know this tune. We barely do!”

Friday’s headliners were the tinnitus-inducing Melt Banana. Squealing Grindcore and glitchy hardcore electro punk sung in Japanese may have been something of an assault on the senses but it was a magnificent high point of the weekend. Guitarist Ichiro Agata, in his trademark dust mask, produced a high-speed, thunderous noise that conjured up a fabulous mosh pit while vocalist Yasuko Onuki barked out her lyrics, whipping the atmosphere up to ever-greater highs. An extreme noise terror indeed.

Saturday

Day Two of Supersonic began somewhat sedately with an onstage conversation between Elizabeth Bernholz and actress Maxine Peake. These two have worked together previously, most notably in Peake’s play Robin/Red/Breast, which also significantly influenced Gazelle Twin’s pagan dive below the surface of our isles, Deep England. Discussing subjects like bringing performance art, masks and weird costumes into music; the freedom allowed by electronic production; a love of freaking people out; the resurgence of folk horror and Bernholz’ involvement in a forthcoming theatrical adaption of Saint Maud, it was a fascinating meeting of minds with both participants emphasising that to be successful in your art, “you have to be open to everything all the time.”

First up on the musical front were the grinding, spaced out motorik grooves of Smote, followed by the harsh and heavy hardcore punk/tribal techno mashup of Indonesian two-piece, Senyawa. Both were more than enough to shake off any hint of a hangover with Rully Shabara and Wukir Suryadi especially bringing a similar vibe to Colonel Kurtz’ compound in Apocalypse Now from the Far East, with distorted vocals and fierce grooves that had many taking serious notice.

Headliner, Emma Ruth Rundle wandered on stage alone, dressed in a long black dress and a translucent white jacket, armed just with an acoustic guitar and a carpet of peddles to revisit her Some Heavy Ocean album and a few other choice offerings from the last 10 years or so. Sparse grungy guitar and plaintive, semi-heard vocals soaked in reverb gave Rundle’s set a distinctly Gothic-folk vibe that was heavy on atmosphere but not over-powering. “The Distance” was particularly dark and foreboding with projections of corn fields behind the stage, while “Darkhorse” was breathy with Rundle’s slurred vocals sending out a warning of “Run little sister. Run so fast” against the backdrop of a bubbling stream.

Emma Ruth Rundle may have been Saturday’s headliner, but she certainly wasn’t where the music ended. The Body and Dis Fig’s set was enough to wake the dead and seemed to be the soundtrack to a modern battlefield. However, it was MC Yallah and Debmaster (pictured above by Alice Needham) that put on the finest performance of the day with a set of fine East African hip hop. Yallah herself strode on to the stage barking “More fire! More fire!” and Debmaster cranked up the noise that got the heat rising and the audience rocking out. It was a fine end to Saturday, leaving many absolutely on their knees by the time of the last beats.

Sunday

Sunday was considerably calmer at Supersonic and featured folkies from the UK, Ireland, the USA and even further afield with a Weird Walk takeover of one of the performance areas. Daisy Rickman (pictured below by Catherine Dineley) was one of the first to hit the stage, with her band looking like serious 1970s hippies, and took on a bunch of songs from her recent Howl album. Soft and mellow with haunting voices, the swirling, trippy tunes were just the thing for a Sunday afternoon and cast a dreamlike and ghostly spell over the audience. She was soon followed by Brighde Chaimbeul, who conjured up some rural Scottish blues from the Western Isles with just a set of bagpipes and a handful of pedals while sat on a stool in the middle of the stage with her eyes tightly closed. Black and white films of desolate moorland, winter landscapes and a young girl folk dancing in a field set the scene as Brighde sang and played tunes soaked in melancholy and sadness taking in such subjects as sacred swans and being haunted by a headless ghost.

After Lankum’s triumphant Sunday headline performance in 2023, two of the band’s side projects performed this year. Unfortunately, One Leg One Eye were timetabled to begin as Øxn were just finishing, some distance away and up the road. So, while I caught all of Øxn’s mesmerising set, I didn’t see much of One Leg One Eye and their all electronic, thunderous drones with spoken samples and found sounds or their gentler, almost acapella songs with sparse and mellow drones. What I did see though, had me wanting significantly more.

Øxn, however, were mellow but certainly not soft. Slow, deliberate and deep drones that incorporated gentle ballads, mournful laments and woozy, expansive cinematic music soundtracked their set, performed in front of a bright red backdrop of their Cyrm album cover. “The Wife of Michael Cleary” was almost acapella with a slow drum beat and a humming drone, while “Cruel Mother” – “Another cheery folk song. This one’s about infanticide!” – build up the pace to a motorik groove before calming down again. Their cover of Scott Walker’s “Farmer in the City” was funereal but stirring, while the downbeat “Love Henry” was truly impressive stuff.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy was Sunday’s headliner and appeared on stage in peaked cap and dungarees, looking like a cross between Leadbelly and Casey Jones. More melodic than Lankum’s progeny, his set had the audience completely rapt, as they sat and soaked up his sweet ballads. That said, it wasn’t a set without bite and when someone shouted from the crowd about the situation in the Middle East, he replied without hesitation, “I agree. Free Palestine” – which was pretty much the only look-in that the outside world got all weekend. Aided by Thomas Deakin, on guitar and clarinet, and John Ashton, on keyboards, his set included tunes such as “Blood of the Wine”, the sparse “Sometimes It’s Hard to Breath” and the Neil Young-like “My Life” before finishing up with a beautiful “New Partner”.

It was a fine ending to another fine weekend of the weird and the wonderful, which might be Supersonic’s last stand in Birmingham. This is due to the out of control gentrification of Digbeth, which is sucking the atmosphere out of the place and sending rents into orbit. It only has to be hoped that the city recognises that the jewels it has to offer are in events like this and not the construction of yet more luxury apartments.

• More New Music reviews on theartsdesk