SUPERSONIC

Supersonic is a three part terror noise showcase in the middle earth of England. It happened a couple of weeks ago.

For three nights, sludge filled the halls of Custard Factory. Plenty of strobing, cataclysmic alterations in thought, and spinal-column-snapping helicopters were the order of the weekend. Of course, Juke was more than happy to attend and lend a hand.

Resident party man/picture maker, Alex de Mora, was our man on the floor. He then decided to naff off to NYC, being the international man of mystique that he is, so that's why these shots are a little late.

He was kind enough to provide us with some great shots now, though, and 3 words to sum up the event:

Chips
And
Curry

A TRIP TO THE FLICKS

Still Corners are a multi-national psych-experience to simultaneously make you fall in love and push needles through your skin from the inside out. After finally getting back to putting out some truly epic tracks after too long of being trapped in their projection screen (or wherever they’ve been hiding), they’re playing a set of shows all over London in the next month to remind people what they’ve been missing/turn them on/creep them the hell out.

As they’re not (that) new anymore, and new band interviews kinda get everyone a little fatigued, we spoke to Leon and Greg from the quintet about their love of all things visual.

So, you guys spend a lot of time watching movies, right? How do they inform your sound?

Greg: I spend a lot of time watching movies. Basically, I just wanted to exaggerate horror films, and it has always been a giant impact visually, audiolly…audiolly’s not even a word! I mean, trying to get that atmosphere across the way that David Lynch and Argento did and stuff was a goal of ours, and that has inspired us with the music that we make.

Leon: All the sparse melodies, weird sort of other worldly sounds…I don’t know what they are, but they just sound amazing.

Quite strange because, although you would possible categorise your music as Pop, it’s definitely got that side of darkness to it that is recognisable from that sort of cinema…

Leon: Yeah, it’s kind of borrowing from that, but it’s all Pop.

Greg: We love Pop music. I think we were just trying to make Pop music, but that little bit stranger. Something that was a bit more interesting…to us.

Still on the subject of films, what are the best films that you have seen this year?

Greg: New films or just films we hadn’t seen before?

Pick any ones you like

Greg: I watched this amazing one the other day called Let’s Scare Jessica To Death.

Haha! Best name ever...

Greg: And Seven Women For Satan. I don’t know, they’re lots of really dodgy horror films. I could run through a million of them, but Let’s Scare Jessica To Death was a really good one. Let’s stick with that one…actually, there was this other one I watched. I was reading this review of really dodgy horror films and they said that this was the movie that inspired David Lynch to make Twin Peaks, and it was called Wrath Of Women or something like that. It was a psychedelic horror, but it truly was amazing. It has become probably one of my favourite films of all time.

Leon: The title’s not as good as Let’s Scare Jessica To Death, though.

What are your top 5 favourite film scores, if you were put on the spot to choose?

1. Rosemary’s Baby

2. Susperia

3. Twin Peaks

4. Mulholland Drive

5. The Trip

6. Manhattan

7. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

8. The Bird With the Crystal Plumage

Greg: That’s 8, but we couldn’t cut it down.

Was there a film that made you want to start a band?

Leon: Rosemary’s Baby. Fucking hell, that was just awesome. I mean, we are more pop than that…that was Krzysztof Komeda, I think.

Greg: It was perfect. That whole movie was exactly how we want to make music as well. Just that weird, strange, “something else is going on, but everything seems normal” vibe.

Leon: Just those opening credits are really inspiring. I think it’s actually Mia Farrow singing it.

As you guys are so into films and they influence your sound so much, do you make you own?

Leon: We’re just massive movie fans. I mean, for me, I watch a few a week as something to do. It’s a massive love, but music is a bit more like my love and hate. Music I just want to make it a nice, pure enjoyment kind of thing. But, no, we just watch a lot of films…and talk about them too.

Wish from Still Corners on Vimeo.

Your video for “Wish” is really great. Who shot that?

Greg: That’s one of my friends from Australia, Lucy Dyson. She’s made a few films in Australia and she’d just moved to London. She really liked the track and wanted to do the video. She knew what we wanted, and just came up with the perfect idea for it. It was really easy, actually. It all just fell into place.

Leon: It was all shot on 16mm, slightly over-exposed, so it gave it a nice warm feeling, which went with the song really well.

FUTURE ISLANDS DISCS

We don't know what "morning-time music" is, but Future Islands make it and it's sort of amazing. Our snapper extraordinaire Alex de Mora pulled them out of their comfortable, warm, rider-filled dressing room at CAMP recently to stand them under some trees. In the rain. At night. Turned out pretty good though, huh?

We know they like the morning, but we were wondering what they make of the night. Specifically, rainy nights in the house, and what they like to fill them with.

Top 5 Rainy Night In Songs

1. The Cure - Let's go to bed
"Cos there's nothing better than cuddling up to your partner at night."

2. Aphex Twin - Alberto Balsalm
"Super chilled song"

3. Boards of Canada - anything from the Campfire Headphase album
"Pretty, dreamy ambient stuff"

4. Brian Eno - Discreet Music
"One of my favourite ambient pieces that has ever been done. It's 30 minutes long - perfect for a bubble bath."

5. The Cure - Exploding Boy
"Memories."

TALKING TRASH WITH TRASH TALK

Trash Talk are one of the most intense live bands we've seen. And we've seen Hanson.

Photographer Alex de Mora talks tourbus movies and beat poetry with the raging post-hardcore nice guys

Trash Talk's Top Five Tourbus Flicks

1. Top gun
It’s a classic. I had the soundtrack as a kid and used to play with my toy planes as I listened to it.

2. Ferris Bueller
One of my favourite movies. I had a total crush on Sloane Peterson ...still do. She's smokin’. A movie about the coolest day ever.

3. Beverley Hills Cop
The funniest film for one-liners. I’m a huge Judge Reinhold fan.

4. Point Break
The only movie that combined surfing, bank robbing, guns ‘n’ shit. In San Francisco they're doing a live action play of it!

5. Cabin Fever
On our tour last summer in Europe we had 2 DVDs and that was one of them. We watched that one way more than the other. It’s such a gross movie. It’s a bad film but we had so much fun watching it cos we memorised the whole thing as it’s all we had to watch.

Tell us a secret?
I played Darth Vader AND Chewbacca in a stage play at high school.

HELLFEST

Photographer Alex de Mora went to France for you to bring back pictures you love of people you don't know and report on the festivities

Every June, a swarm of denim and leather can be found graduating towards Clisson on the west coast of France.

In comparison to some of the overcrowded and characterless UK metal festivals, Hellfest has a genuinely unique atmosphere, which can be mostly given to the fact that the attendance is much more intimate at only 20,000.

When I first stepped out into the main part of the festival I was quite honestly overwhelmed at the sea of black t-shirts in front of me. I've been to plenty of festivals in my time but this really felt like some sort of 'Metal Mecca'.

This is a place where dedicated metal fans (and a bunch of idiots from East London) can come to drink beer, headbang and shout/roar at each other for 3 days. There's no aggro, no over-zealous security, and importantly, no dickheads asking you for a free hug. To keep yourself alive over the festival there's also a giant supermarket just outside the site where you can load up on cheap beers, baguettes and 1 euro bottles of cava.

I'm not one to review bands, so I'll just let you check the line up out for yourself (http://www.hellfest.fr/artistes.php). Let's just say I saw three quarters of Kyuss get back on stage together and subsequently blow my mind on Sunday night... I won.

http://www.hellfest.fr/index.php

Primavera

4 reasons why Primavera Sound might
be the best festival in the world:

1. It’s in Barcelona. This is great because it’s a smouldering
dust pit of culture, food, and people you really want to touch.

2. The music is great. An education in everything from 60s punk
to the most modern tech-step. Like ATP but with better dancey stuff.

3. The timing. It goes from 6pm to 6am so you don’t see too much
of the day. This is a problem if you’ve booked into a hostel and
have to share a dormitory with people who decide to get up in the
day. Not a problem if you book your own apartment with a roof top
terrace to chill on.

Top Tip: These two options cost about the same if you shop around.

4. The girls. Roughly 6 times per night you have to stop mid-conversation
because you’ve just seen the most beautiful woman in the world.
She appears to be everywhere at Primavera.

This year it was particularly awesome because… Nah, the first
day was kind of rubbish (the first rubbishish day I’ve experienced
in four years of Primavera attendance).

This reviewer missed Monotonix due to unforeseen circumstances.
Apparently the cheap apartments mentioned above are only cheap
if your landlord doesn’t catch the extra people staying there
and delay your departure for the first night. But apparently
Monotonix were ace. The rest of Thursday’s music wasn’t so great.

Obviously a lot of people like The XX but they should never
be allowed to play early enough in the evening when people still
have brain cells. Dull. As. Hell. Broken Social Spleen were
an unapologetic blend of smug senility that made me want to punch
things. Pavement were alright but the grass at the back was too
comfy so I fell asleep on it.

So that was the first day and it sucked a bit. Indie is like
Turkish food. It is a beautiful thing but if you indulge in
it all night it will send you into a heavy sleep.

But the next two days ruled hard. Grizzly Bear, Yeasayer, Joker, Major Lazer,
The Almighty Defenders, Pixies,The Slits, Panda Bear, all fantastic.
Even Pet Shop Boys and Mark Almond were pretty damn good.
And we missed a whole load of awesomeness in Sleigh Bells, Health,
Orbital, Fuck Buttons, The Fall for reasons varying from ‘forgot’
to ‘incapable’. Damn those Spaniards and their magic hospitality.

What else can you mention about a festival you love without boring?
Maybe the one encounter with a genuwine musician. The drummer
from Titus Andronicus (who were also ace, forgot about them)
looks like Droopy on a confusing mix of speed and dope.
When asked if he could help a tired brother out and fix
up some MD with his rad industry contacts, he responded
in the coolest East Coast stoner drawl. ‘Doooood, it’s not
what I go for. I mean, I don’t judge you, in fact I hope you
find as many drugs as you possibly can and do them all,
and have the greatest time, but unfortunately I can’t help
you out in this situation’. He was a sweetheart.
A character from somewhere between Dawson’s Creek
and a Harmony Korine movie. And he summed up the good times
vibe of Primavera patrons perfectly.

See below for evidence of aforementioned beautiful ladies, badman guys and Spanish hospitality.