A music-heavy arts festival designed to interrogate language sounds like a hard sell. But in its short life, the annual Supersense festival, held in and under the Arts Centre Melbourne across a three-day weekend since 2015 (it took a break in 2018), has cemented itself as an attractive vehicle for trying.
Like progressive contemporaries Unsound Adelaide and Tasmania’s Dark Mofo and Mona Foma, Supersense asks its audience retune their antennae before attending. That’s not to say there wasn’t something for everyone on the diverse 2019 program. Peppered with single-ticket acts spanning music, theatre and dance, three longer multi-act bills – Friday’s Maximal, and Saturday’s Minimal and Superdrone – cleverly integrated multiple disciplines into a dense explorative experience.
If the sound of paper and house bricks being prodded under a contact mic for 45 minutes by experimental sound artist Graham Lambkin wasn’t your bag, perhaps big band balladeer Marlon Williams stirred things up – stripped to a singlet, backed by an orchestra and booming an operatic rendition of Je Crois Entendre, from Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers.
If the swooning noir-pop of elfin NZ sisters Purple Pilgrims didn’t mist your eyes a touch, the bit-crushed punch of Liars’ Angus Andrew pausing his fitting and thudding noise-techno to mournfully moan, “And it’s time again to explode your heart,” may have heated your cheeks. Maybe you got lucky like I did and found each equally cathartic.
That’s if you could first find your way around the building’s labyrinthine warren of carpeted stairs, wine-coloured walls and flesh-pink couches. “More and more we have the feeling that I am getting nowhere,” repeated acclaimed US theatre director and performer Robert Wilson in his sublimely challenging performance of John Cage’s 1961 Lecture on Nothing at the Playhouse on Saturday evening. “That is a pleasure which will continue.”
He was speaking in a circular pattern about form and structure, but as my brain let go of logic I could also see he was talking about trying to find out where the next band was on.
Stage 1 had an expansive, dark, warehouse-like feel, which hosted three dancers jittering like sexually frustrated electric particles as part of choreographer Kimberly Bartosik’s mesmerising I Hunger For You. Also here, US post-pop iconoclast John Maus belted himself in the head while stalking the stage eyes-closed, singing passionately of banality in touchdowns (Touchdown) and rain (...And The Rain Came Down) over nervy beats and cavernous reverb. A dance party raged around him, throwing empty cans and shouting along despite his distressed demeanor. With Maus you can leave wondering if that common language of how gigs usually work – the polite artist explicitly inviting an audience to their curated experience – is actually the thing that needs to break for collective unconsciousness to take flight.
And maybe not. Saturday’s Minimal program explored “possibilities of time” and “minimalist focus”, but I found vocalist Jessica Aszodi’s performance of the repetitive Prelude to The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc by US minimalist composer Julius Eastmen a slog. Fortunately Melbourne’s Black Cab were on hand to turn the cramped, makeshift Stage 3 found plonked in a hallway, into the daggy Art Centre’s version of a heaving techno den.
On Sunday afternoon reliably ingenious experimental jazz trio The Necks bent time to their will at Hamer Hall, seemingly futzing illogically with their instruments until 30 minutes in, when a gorgeously kinetic thrum appeared from all the pieces. With this band you can only ever assume it was the knot they’d been trying to tie – always a mysterious gift. The spell was broken by that double-bill’s headliner, Art Ensemble of Chicago, who went on to slow time to the point of boredom.
Fortunately Aldous Harding remained to explore the pause. The NZ folk-pop outlier closed Supersense at the Playhouse theatre with a brilliant, provocative handling of her fantastic latest album Designer – and the audience itself. “I wonder if I was what you expected?” she said wide-eyed towards set’s end, cutting off cheers with, “that wasn’t directed at you”. Trying to locate who or what Harding is directed at is a big part of her appeal.
Backed by a stoic four-piece, Harding shared a quiver of wide-stanced swaggers, killer songs founded on cunning melodicism and a voice that flitted from spooky lows to a high trill that sounded beamed in from an offstage phonograph. Following a stunning slo-mo cover of Gerry Rafferty’s Right Down the Line and a new song, Old Peel – which saw her generously whacking a cup with a stick – Harding was done. A standing ovation saw time whir back to life and we again emerged from the stairs to street level thankful for Supersense.
