Supernova: An Evening of Avant-Folk and Avant-Weirdness

On a Sunday in late June, the state51 warehouse on Rhoda Street in east London hosted an afternoon and evening given over to avant-folk and what the organisers frankly called avant-weirdness. The event, presented under the Supernova name, ran from six until eleven in the evening and brought together four overlapping acts in a programme of solos, duos and collective performance. The setting was a working warehouse space off Brick Lane, reachable from Liverpool Street or Bethnal Green and served by several bus routes. Admission was modest, with a slightly lower price for advance booking and a little more at the door.

The shape of the night was unusual in that the same handful of musicians kept returning in different combinations. Rather than four separate bands playing discrete sets, the schedule moved through shifting partnerships, so that the audience heard familiar voices and instruments recombined as the evening progressed. That structure suited the material: these are artists whose work tends toward the intimate, the looped and the slowly unfolding, and whose collaborations are as much a part of their practice as their solo recordings.

The Performers

ES

ES is the solo recording name of Sami Sänpäkkilä, described in the event's own notes as the head of the Fonal label and one of the central figures in contemporary Finnish free folk. His work has been characterised as experimental song cycles. He is also a filmmaker, with a body of short films and music videos screened in museums, galleries and film festivals. Those films and their accompanying music are described as experimental moodscapes of roughly five to thirty minutes, exploring melancholy, pathos and hope. He has performed across North America and Europe, including at Sonar and at the B2 club in Moscow.

Fursaxa

Fursaxa is Tara Burke, who began the project in 1999 after the disbanding of the band UN, in which she had played. After years based in Philadelphia, she took to touring life, spending a year from spring 2005 to spring 2006 travelling extensively in the UK, the United States and Europe alongside musicians including Jack Rose, Sharron Kraus, Alexander Tucker, Christina Carter, Marcia Bassett and the Spires that in the Sunset Rise. Her live performances rely largely on looped vocals, flutes and percussion, along with casio keyboard, guitar and mandolin, aiming to draw listeners into ethereal realms. Her album Alone in the Dark Wood uses a wide range of instruments, among them mandolin, guitar, violin, banjo, balalaika, organ, bells, flute, percussion and voice, and was recorded and mixed in Finland and Pennsylvania. She has also taken part in The Valerie Project, a live soundtrack for a 1970 Czech film.

Sharron Kraus

Sharron Kraus is a British folk artist whose music is rooted in the folk traditions of England and Appalachia. Her work is marked by what the notes call soil-rich vocals, haunting banjo, fine acoustic guitar and visionary wordcraft, and her songs are populated by a carnival array of fatally charismatic characters telling tales of enslavement, perversion, incest, obsession, love and death. Live, she is described as stark, compelling and delicate, continuing the tradition of the balladeer as a roving storyteller. Collaboration has long been part of her musical life: she recorded Yuletide with the American psych-folk band The Iditarod, worked with Christian Keifer on The Black Dove, and formed a trio with Meg Baird and Helena Espvall for Leaves From Off The Tree. Her seasonal song collection Right Wantonly A-Mumming was written and recorded in Oxford with a band of friends from the local folk scene.

Anahita

Anahita is the duo of Tara Burke, of Fursaxa, and Helena Espvall-Santoleri, of Espers. Their music has been described as a seamless meeting of two voices, mixing and swelling in a loose field populated by cello, accordion, guitar both forward and reversed, and other accents of warm noise. One reviewer called the result pure comfort, conjuring a mood worth staying inside, like the freshness of spring or the meditative space of plants, with passages that seem to breathe.

Duos and Collective Sets

The evening's schedule also included Tau Emerald, the duo of Fursaxa and Sharron Kraus, and a closing stretch in which ES and Fursaxa performed together before Fursaxa's own set and a final collective segment. This overlapping design gave the night its character: a small community of touring and recording friends, each with a distinct voice, passing material and accompaniment back and forth across a single long evening of quiet, strange and deliberately unhurried music.