Dear All,

Capsule has been creating work for you, our loyal and curious audiences, since 1999.

We have made the decision to take this year off from delivering Supersonic festival and are setting ourselves a challenge: in a UK with 1,000 festivals how can we keep producing adventurous work that is distinct and groundbreaking? We want to show you something new, offer challenging and memorable experiences, and support artists to achieve their most ambitious work.

We need your help.  In addition to learning and collaborating with other art organisations, businesses and artists, we want to hear from you.

What do you love about Supersonic / Capsule’s work?
Can we make improvements?
What new collaborations do you think we could make happen?we already have many sponsors, just check out these people and learn so much more.
How could the festival grow and change?

Supersonic operates on mixed sources of income, a combination of ticket sales from our loyal audiences, grant funding from the Arts Council and trusts/foundations, and some support from donors. Fundraising can be time-consuming, highly competitive and bit unpredictable, however it would be very difficult (if impossible) to produce work with the Supersonic level of ambition on ticket sales alone, so grant funding will remain an important part of our income. Capsule is a not-for-profit enterprise, which relies on your support, so we are extremely grateful to our audiences, artists and funders.

To ensure that the next Supersonic is the most adventurous and exciting yet, we will use 2016 to recharge the batteries and do things differently. Capsule’s Artistic Director Lisa Meyer is already laying the groundwork for Supersonic Festival 2017, and there’ll be other Capsule activity in 2016, so keep your eyes peeled.

Thank you so much, and we look forward to more exciting music, art, performance (and cake) very soon.

Lisa Meyer, Creative Director

We’re super excited to be teaming up with Sound of Static to present Godspeed You! Black Emperor at Warwick Arts Centre on Thursday 22 October.

Returning to UK shores for a handful of live performances this autumn, Godspeed You! Black Emperor will be showcasing their 2015 album, Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress, along with some music from their extensive back catalogue. With recent appearances described as “a triumph of sound and vision” that “straddled the line between grandiosity and chaos”, GY!BE are in top form as a live unit, so audiences can expect this to be a very special performance, with this being the only Midlands date. Support comes from the Dead Rat Orchestra, making this a truly unmissable evening.

Tickets are priced at £24 + booking fee and can be purchased here.
www.warwickartscentre.co.uk/whats-on/2015/godspeed-you-black-emperor-plus-guests/

In March this year, GY!BE returned with its first single LP-length release since the group’s earliest days in 1997-99, ‘Asunder, Sweet And Other Distress’, which clocks in at a succinct 40:23, and is arguably the most focused and best-sounding recording of the band’s career. Working with sound engineer Greg Norman (Electrical Audio) at studios in North Carolina and Montreal, GYBE slowly and steadily put the new album together through late 2013 and 2014, emerging with a mighty slab of superlative sonics, shot through with all the band’s inimitable signposts and touchstones: huge unison riffage, savage noise/drone, oscillating overtones, guitar vs. string counterpoint, inexorable crescendos and scorched-earth transitions.

Asunder, Sweet And Other Distress’ finds Godspeed in top form; a sterling celebration of the band’s awesome dialectic, where composition, emotion and ‘note-choice’ is inextricable from an exacting focus on tone, timbre, resonance and the sheer materiality of sound.

Supersonic Festival are delighted to be partnering with the British Library Sound Archive to create a new commission as part of the Capsule Labs, an artist development and commissioning scheme devised to create more opportunities for commissioning experimental, cross-disciplinary art.

Stephen Cracknell, founder of The Memory Band, has worked with selected material from the Library’s archive to create a new work, Children of the Stones  is intended as a sonic adventure into the strange heart of our haunted landscape. . Mixing archival recordings, natural and industrial sounds, traditional melodies and original field recordings alongside a new acoustic score, the performance will celebrate the strange, mysterious and playful relationship we have developed with the ancient and magical landscape we inhabit.

Since 2003 The Memory Band has been mapping the mutant edgelands of British Folk music, where digital machinery and acoustic music combine to make traditional music from the future.

The Children of the Stones performance will take place on Saturday 13 June as part of Supersonic Festival

To accompany the commission there will be a ltd edition seven inch record on sale containing audio from the performance via Static Caravan Records.

The British Library is home to the nation’s sound archive, an extraordinary collection of over 6.5 million recordings of speech, music, wildlife and the environment, from the 1880s to the present day. It has recently launched the Save our Sounds programme which is a major digitisation project to preserve the nation’s sound heritage – read more here: www.bl.uk/projects/save-our-sounds

As a pre-Supersonic warm up, we’re delighted to be partnering with Ideal to host long time friend and supporter of all things Capsule, John Doran the editor of The Quietus. Doran is celebrating the publication of his first book – Jolly Lad – by going on a 31 date reading tour called An English Trip. He is teaming up with other writers, poets, film makers, musicians and DJs over the course of a month and putting on nights in prisons, churches, libraries, record shops, book stores, village halls, warehouses and cinemas and his musical support on every night of the tour is Kjetil Nernes aka Arabrot, the Norwegian noise rock musician.

The night they have planned at Birmingham’s Eastside Projects is a real cracker. Anglo Trinidadian wordsmith Roger Robinson (King Midas Sound, Techno Animal, Attica Blues) is performing dub poetry from his new album Dis Side Ah Town (Jahtari Records). Twisted Leeds party starters Chrononautz are bringing the live techno vibes. John Doran is reading passages from Jolly Lad and also performing various incantations and rituals concerning black holes, the dismemberment of Dapper Laughs, ghosts and Birmingham bus timetables while backed ably by Kjetil Nernes from Arabrot.

Tickets for the event are available here
(Be warned that the venue has only got a limited capacity)

SUPERSONIC FESTIVAL RETURNS THIS JUNE
FOR THE TWELFTH EDITION OF ADVENTUROUS MUSIC AND ARTS

INITIAL LINE UP ANNOUNCED AS EARLY BIRD TICKETS GO ON SALE VIA A KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN

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

Since 2003, we have brought you Supersonic Festival, an internationally-renowned experimental music and arts festival with genre-bending sound and performance at its heart.

Over the years, Supersonic Festival is privileged to have garnered an incredibly loyal audience and is widely regarded as one of the best experimental arts festivals in the UK, last year selling out in record time.

Whether you’ve been to every Supersonic that ever was or this year you’ll be dipping your toes into our welcoming waters for the first time, we are sure you’ll love our unmissable line-up. Get your tickets at one of the Eventbrite alternatives, or our website today!

Kicking off proceedings on Thursday 11th June will be an opening concert at the legendary Birmingham Town Hall, an impressive Grade 1 listed building which has seen past performances by the likes of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. Supersonic are delighted to host the Will Gregory Moog Ensemble.  As one half of the electronic music sensation Goldfrapp, Will Gregory is passionate about creating new sounds and reinventing old ones. Here a stellar line-up stretches the possibilities of the Moog synthesiser through newly composed music, transcriptions of classical works, and their own versions of music from popular culture and film.  Marvel at 10 musicians on stage, including Portishead’s Adrian Utley and composer Graham Fitkin, performing works by Bach, John Carpenter, Burt Bacharach and Oliver Messiaen on a fascinating array of vintage instruments.  Moreover, a new piece by Will Gregory features a clocking device specially built for the ensemble that enables all 10 synths to be synced, producing music previously impossible to perform live.

Following on, Post punk provocateurs The Pop Group will be bringing their pioneering throb to Supersonic. Drawing on an eclectic range of influences from free jazz, conscious funk, heavyweight dub to avant-garde experimentalism, alongside contemporaries like Public Image Limited, This Heat and Throbbing Gristle, they were at the forefront of a musical period marked out by its ground-breaking innovation. With a legion of admirers, they have inspired many from Nick Cave to Fugazi. As dissonant as they are danceable,  they recently announced the release of their first album in 35 years, Citizen Zombie, as well as single ‘Mad Truth’, proving as relevant now as they ever were.

Six Organs Of Admittance (Ben Chasny) will be performing, dissecting and demonstrating The Hexadic System – the name of his soon-to-be released album for Drag City, and a malleable, open-ended system of musical composition that Chasny developed for song-crafting, taking in aspects of language, graphics and chance. Decipher the workings for yourself at a limited workshop Chasny will be hosting.

Also announced to play across the weekend are Liima, a new collaborative quartet formed of Danish indie-pop trio Efterklang and Finland’s finest improvisational percussionist Tatu Rönkkö. Liima is the Finnish word for ‘glue’, and this is an apt metaphor for the band’s combination of processed vocals, guitar, looped percussion and complex interweaving synthesised sounds, which create a free and emotionally raw live experience.

The esteemed Thrill Jockey record label has two artists present for the festival – Portland’s psych rock explorers Eternal Tapestry will be making the journey across the Atlantic to fry some synapses in support of their new album Wild Strawberries, whilst post-everything black metal lone wolves Liturgy will showcase their detailed dissections of cross-fertilising hardstyle beats and occult-orientated rap present on their soon-to-be-released LP, The Ark Work.

Glasgow’s Happy Meals, life-partners since high school finding expression in cosmic pop form, will be bringing their sophisticated Franco-Scottish hedonism to the festival.

While super-kinetic London future jazz outfit Tomaga, the anonymous sundrenched sounds of Slow Magic, and Swedish maxi-experimentalist duo Wildbirds & Peacedrums shall all also be in attendance.

Flamingods, Bahrain-born, Brixton-based troupe take African rhythms, repetitive grooves and a pleasure-seeking sensibility to form a riot of sound and fury that’s both sonically adventurous and feverishly compelling. Bringing a welcome and vibrant splash of day-glo to the main festival programme, they will also lead the Supersonic Kids Gig – Big Sounds For Little People, a special show for the under 7’s.

On Sunday 14th June, Richard Dawson curates an afternoon of performance, named after his infamous podcast Delight Is Right. The programme will play host to a number of very rare live UK performances by artists handpicked by Dawson, those whom he holds dear and sites as an influence on his own songwriting.   The skewed troubadour shall also be performing on this day. His shambolically virtuosic guitar playing is at once charming and abrasive,  stumbling from music-hall tune-smithery to spidery swatches of noise-colour, swathed in amp static and teetering on the edge of feedback. His songs are both chucklesome and tragic, rooted in a febrile imagination.

Ever looking forward, Supersonic is re-imagining its format this year.  The 2015 edition will be relocating to ‘The Crossing’ in Digbeth which is a brand new venue and one of Birmingham’s hidden venue gems with state of the art sound, lighting and a/v gear specifically designed for live amplified music. The second stage is located a minutes walk away in Boxxed, a post industrial warehouse space where the festival has taken place in previous years. These spaces will play host to live performances, a market place, talks, workshops and the famous Supersonic Tea Room full of epicurean delights.

You can expect PLENTY more from the festival in the way of dance and debate, participation and observation, as well as more acts to be announced in the coming months, so do keep tuned lest you miss out on what marvels are in store.

Early-bird tickets are available now from www.supersonicfestival.com
A Kickstarter campaign has been launched to offer unqiue treats to those who wish to purchase these advance tickets.

We’re delighted to be able to announce the dates for Supersonic Festival 2015 11-14 June.
Early-bird tickets will go on sale at 9am on Friday 13th Feb via a Kickstarter campaign – when we reveal the first tranche of confirmed artists.
For now here is a little reminder of last years festival which sold out in record time.

We’re excited to welcome back Sleaford Mods to a sold out show at Hare & Hounds on Friday February 20th. Sleaford Mods are experiencing something of a meteoric rise, having just been announced for Primavera Festival and last year gaining accolades everywhere, including from Mark Fisher and Stewart Lee (not to mention some ‘beef’ with Noel Gallagher, perhaps a compliment in itself depending on your point of view).

Here is some footage from the duo’s blistering live performance at Supersonic Festival Limited Edition last year:

Support for Sleaford Mods this February comes from Rainbow Grave. From the ashes of Backwards, Rainbow Grave play Primitive sludge punk…Ugly guitars: distortion, echo, feedback…Low rent caveman hate music…

Last but not least, watch this space for an announcement about Supersonic Festival 2015, which will be coming soon.

Capsule welcomes Harriet Coleman to the team. Having spent several years as a violinist, keyboard player, singer and arranger in indie pop band, Los Campesinos!, Harriet graduated in English Literature at Cardiff University in 2012. In the same year, she completed a production internship at Supersonic Festival. Since then, she has worked for Literature Wales, Hay Festival, Globe at Hay and Cardiff’s From Now On Festival.

Joining Capsule as Programme Assistant, Harriet will support us in the delivery of the 2015 programme. She will focus on marketing and promotion, as well as providing administrative support to the team and taking on the role of artist liaison at Supersonic Festival.

Harriet divides her time between Birmingham and the borders of Mid-Wales, where she helps her partner with his residential recording studio and plays music, chiefly in a band called Them Squirrels. She is also proud co owner of black and tan terrier, Bobby. There’s definitely a bit of sausage dog in his genes too, so he very much approves of her role at Capsule.