Sydney. Ain’t. Dead.

Sydney is the runt of the litter. With weak bones and a shy demeanour, it’s visibly underweight. We live under a nanny state where poker machines have more value than live music. Endless bureaucratic red tape ensnares the hospitality sector and live music industry. There are no 24 hour clubs. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, it feels like years of chronic underfunding for the arts have finally caught up with Sydney. Sometimes it feels like there are barely any choices for worthwhile weekend events. From a city of 5 million people, you’d expect better.

But given time and patience, the city can not only surprise; it can win you over. The ironic flip side of the relative dearth of exciting events is that when a Sydney party is good it’s really good. The crowd knows they might not have another chance to dance and bond like this for weeks.

Mode was an effervescent eruption of bottled-up energy – a moment where the community reached a critical mass of people who were up for it. Even the high ticket price, almost $200 including the compulsory private ferry ticket, did not end up deterring Sydney’s night owls. The sold-out event was a reminder that community persists, that no amount of wingnut fun policing by authorities can kill passion, love and peer support.

Cockatoo Island, a former penal establishment where convicts were sent for secondary punishment and former shipyard, now heritage listed, is an appropriate setting for a techno-focused festival. Most musicians, critics and scholars pinpoint the post-industrial landscape of Detroit — with its derelict warehouses, rusted automobile skeletons, rotting wood and mosaics of cracked glass — as the birthplace of techno. From the late 80s, techno became the sound of the city’s disenfranchised Black working class. This DIY ethos amid societal and economic collapse in Detroit became a form of self-empowerment. Then, when the Berlin Wall fell down, techno became the anthem to reunification, finding a home in urban ruins.

There’s probably no Sydney location that makes more sense for Mode Festival than Cockatoo Island – that rust-filled concrete skeleton of the city’s industrial, maritime and penal heritage. It’s a throwback to techno’s spatial origins.

That’s not to say the crowd was an especially disenfranchised one. The financial barrier posed by the ticket cost is a diversity issue.

Getting there in the first place though was a difficult task. A last-minute frenzy for tickets meant that tickets bizarrely sold out for the mandatory private ferry while tickets were still being sold for the event itself, leading many punters to vent their confusion and fury on the festival’s Facebook page. This was undoubtedly an unsettling experience for those who bought tickets on the day. Was I about to walk into Fyre Festival 2.0?

The next hurdle was less unsurprising. Police had stationed a sniffer dog at the entrance. Cue: side eye and hasty looks over shoulders.

Entering the festival it felt like our supposed caretakers, those in power, had dumped a pile of hole-ridden functionally-useless hazmat suits on the ground amid an acid rain storm, and then vanished. The prospect of greener pastures beyond the rainclouds pushed attendees into the tempest all the same. Numerous studies have shown that the presence of police and sniffer dogs encourage higher-risk drug taking behaviour by festivalgoers, who will consume drugs at music events regardless of whether police are present.

Police presence on the island itself was intense. It wasn’t exactly an environment that inspired ease of mind.

Regardless, the crowd was notably well-behaved and welcoming. This was surely a reflection of the maturity and street smarts of attendees and the presence of Dancewize rather than the visibility of cops with guns strapped to their legs.

Mode Festival struck the perfect balance between platforming cutting-edge, genre-blurring music, which was still accessible, and pulling together a large crowd, composed crucially of the right kind of people. The organisers must take full commendation for booking this line-up and ensuring news of the festival reached the right ears.

“We are grateful for the crowd that we attract”, say Bizarro, the crew behind Mode Festival. “Everyone was really responsible and respectful. Everyone knows the realities surrounding drug dogs and over-policing; it’s known to correlate with erratic patron behaviour.”

Sure: the boutique festival had its teething issues. The wait in the line outside the Boiler Room stage was tedious, and the atmosphere felt noticeably less vibrant inside despite an early standout set by LOIF – a sign that underground rave culture has long outgrown the sanitised intervention of Boiler Room. Those drinking were faced with 10 dollar mid-strength beers and 13 dollar seltzers. Communication was often lacking from the organisers. You get the idea.

But, palpable entry jitters and organisational chaos aside, almost every person I talked to agreed that promoters Bizarro had pulled off a beauty. The mood was infectious.

The hordes had rocked up for their New Age holy communion. Over 3000 people. The island’s cavernous buildings loomed like churches, all high roofs and sandstone. What they received was a blessing – a festival that will surely stick out as a salient moment in this city’s cultural development.

The main stage was a stomp fest of squelchy tek and trance which featured the most consistency in 4/4 kicks – prior to Djrum’s set anyway.

The sheer volume and crispness of the immense sound system – what I’d term a sonic cannon – was hypnotising. I’m no sound connoisseur but it’s safe to say: listening to that rig was a world away from watching a mate shove their Youtube-to-MP3-converter-rip through a pair of QSC K12s and an 18 inch sub at a dust-prone rave under a bridge in suburbia. I’ve rarely heard anything like it.

Performing live, Aurora Halal channelled the audience through sci fi electro and grungy techno – bass throbs that sounded as if they were emanating from deep within a forest. Close your eyes and you might be in the middle of a doof, ankle deep in slop and mud. The pace quickened in the Turbine Hall throughout the day, reaching an apotheosis when high priest KI/KI threw down straight tribecore from 8 PM. Lasers swirled like vine-encumbered trees in twilight groves, making neon clouds out of wisps of cigarette and vape smoke. Bodies dissolved into cult-like homogeneity as rolling waves of bass swept over the dancefloor, cleansing it. With KI/KI at the helm journeying through goa trance, Y2K hard trance and acid techno, the Turbine Hall had lift off. It was a euphoria chamber.

The food was a cut above your usual festival fare and the installations eye-catching. Luminescent sculptures, dotted around the landscape, hauled the event into the future, as if the audience were dancing on the set of Bladerunner or Mute. Soft Centre’s influence here can’t be omitted. Soft Centre’s successful fusion of performance art, lighting installations and experimental dance music has shown the country what is possible, but Mode Festival never felt derivative either.

Djrum closed out the main stage with a master class in vinyl mixing, turning the festival into a hug convention. Ball of thread in hand, Djrum laid out a path of thematic consistency for the audience, leading them through a musical labyrinth of trance, breaks and jungle. Until Mode, I don’t think I’d ever heard a set that has featured both a DJ pulling back vinyl records to scratch and playing techno, all the while ensuring it makes sense. The end product was verging on IDM.

It seemed an odd choice to close the festival – Djrum is by no means a particularly ‘hard’ artist – but the ethereal melodies of tracks like Hard To Say and Showreel, Pt. 3 were appropriate reflections of the wistful nostalgia and euphoria the festival inspired.

It’s been a hell of a long wait. But Sydney is back.

I’ll admit: like many I was sceptical of Mode Festival. The ticket price seemed exorbitantly high and I was concerned that the music would be too chill, too mellow, too middle-of-the-road for someone more inclined to enjoy the genre clusterfuck of breakcore or the jarring intensity of industrial hardcore and gabber. Sydney is Australia’s capital of hard dance and I’m a product of that environment.

But that’s what Mode always was: a risk.

Large-scale event management is a logistical and financial nightmare and nowhere is this more pronounced than in NSW. Toss into the mix the location, Cockatoo Island, and you have to admire Bizarro for their dedication. The policing fee alone was “pretty serious”, Bizarro tell Verve Zine, “far higher than we expected”.

7 weeks out from the festival, NSW Liquor & Gaming threw a spanner in the works, hitting Mode with a recently-introduced festival classification – a ‘subject festival’. “In essence, this means we are under the microscope”, Bizarro say. “We were advised pretty early on that the likelihood of such a classification was pretty low – we were wrong.”

Now the festival has passed, the future looks brighter. “The reality is that now we have succeeded in our first year – no serious safety-related situations. We are able to reply to these powers with feedback and positive evidence.”

For those lucky enough to experience it, Mode Festival offered world class production with the intimacy and warmth of a Marrickville warehouse rave. It never forgot about its audience.

Bizarro have their eyes on Cockatoo Island for the 2023 edition. “We can’t really see past how perfectly Cockatoo Island fist. We really see eye to eye with the venue managers, and will aim to grow together at that site.”

I, for one, cannot wait.

Highlights: LOIF. Upsammy. KI/KI. Djrum. The location. The food stalls. The stylish and impressive but not over-the-top lighting in the Turbine Hall and Convict Workshops. Multidisciplinary artist Maggz wrapped up in what resembled neon life support inside a metallic cube, both eerily human and non-human. Anuraag calling out Boiler Room at the end of their set for exploiting artist’s labour and hogging grant money that should have gone to genuine grassroots organisations.

Words by Robbie Mason.

Robbie is a young freelance writer, editor, creative and zine-maker, previously published in Vice, Voiceworks, ARNA, Pulp, Honi Soit and other obscure corners of the internet. He is currently studying a Masters of Publishing at USyd. You can follow Robbie on Instagram and Substack.

Thumbnail image courtesy: Max Kelly.

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Mode Festival Review, 2022

Sydney. Ain’t. Dead.