What is Supersonic Festival?
Supersonic Festival is an experimental music festival that occurs in Birmingham every year. The music festival includes electronic music, doom metal and other music outside of the mainstream. Musically, Melt Banana were the highlight for me. The festival also has workshops to help people explore experimentation in the arts. I applied to run a workshop based on issimo! a experimental performance group that is based at Artefact. Artefact is an artist and musician collective based in Stirchley, South Birmingham.
issimo! workshop pitch
My workshop pitch was to have workshop participants create instruments out of items that no longer were being used for their initial purpose. This could be tennis balls, old CD’s. bottles etc. We’d then go onto try out some perform some experimental workshop pieces using our newly built instruments. Happily, Supersonic accepted my pitch to run this workshop. Alex, a fellow member of Artefact was going to assist me with the workshop.
The actual workshop
The workshop took place on September the 1st. Those taking part took the available materials and created some varied instruments. One of them looked like a variation of Hypno Disc from Robot Wars, which may have been more suitable as a weapon than an instrument. We had instruments that resembled mini drumkits and other percussive instruments. We spent about 45 minutes making our instruments.
Once we’d finished making our new concoctions, we took part in a piece I created for a previous issimo! workshop at the Artefact Christmas Party 2023. I wrote a bunch of scenarios/ emotions and put them into a hat. Participants then picked scenarios out at random and we had to try and play how they made us feel for 30 seconds. One scenario was “the fossil fuel industry had been replaced by one Dutch Wind Turbine. There was a mixture of panic noises made by the participants, though the creator of Hypno Disc was very relaxed about the situation. The creator said that they were confident that their new musical creation could single handed power the word.
Creating new pieces of music
We wrapped up the workshop by creating two 30 second pieces of music with our new instruments. The first was completely improvised, where we had completely free reign to make whatever noises we wanted. Our second piece was created after we had a discussion about what we wanted the piece to be. We decided that we wanted to change the dynamics of the piece in our second attempt. Start off with low, gentle dynamics for a quiet beginning with the piece finishing with loud crashing dynamics to end the 30 second piece. This is what we attempted, but when I listened to both pieces after the workshop, both pieces sounded very similar.
The end result did not matter, what was important that the participants of the workshop had the opportunity to be creative, and we got to give use to some items that had stopped being useful. Feedback from participants was positive.
Supersonic Festival is back in Birmingham next year from August the 29th-31st 2025 and showcases niche, and experimental musicians from across the world.
