Supersonic Preview

Drowned in Sound has a great interview with Capsule’s Lisa Mayer previewing this weekend’s Supersonic Festival at the Custard Factory, outlining where the festival came from, what it’s all about and what’s scheduled.

We’ve been doing Capsule now since 1999. Basically, the way we started was because we both had pretty eclectic musical taste and at that time we were traveling round the country to gigs, as bands just weren’t playing in Birmingham. We then decided that, instead of moaning about it, we’d start inviting bands to come and play in Birmingham. We realised that there was also a great amount of talent in Brum and wanted to find a way of supporting that by pairing up touring bands with high quality local acts. Birmingham is one of those places that has a bad outside perception, but once you come here you realise that there is loads going on.

Beyond the main draw of the music there’s always a lot of peripheral activity at Supersonic and I thought it would be handy to excerpt this paragraph and throw a bunch of links into it.

We have a great cinema program put together, this year by 7 Inch Cinema, and also Southern Records have dug deep into their archive to pull out some rare live footage from the likes of Sonic Youth (circa 1985), Big Black and Butthole Surfers… and documentaries on The Obsessed and Neurosis. We’re also screening The Knife DVD on the main stage. We have two exhibitions as part of the Festival, one which responds to the title of our symposium, ‘Metal‘, and includes artists Lucy Mclauchlan, Savage Pencil, French, Gas, No Heaven Waiting and Mark Titchner. For the other, we’ve invited the Outcrowd Collective to take over one of the units at the Custard Factory and turn it into a mini gallery.

Okay, I’ll admit defeat on finding a link for Gas. You try.