'Soft Centre Review 2023' / Robbie Mason
Soft Centre puts Sydney on the map as a global innovator in the arts, and saves Vivid Sydney from the blackhole of ignominy.
Violent Magic Orchestra perform at Soft Centre, 2023. Image courtesy: Jordan Munns.
Soft Centre’s 2023 edition was a cathartic outpouring of frustration, ecstasy and egress. It was a Gen Z expression of existential angst in a city marred with out-of-control living costs and over-policing, a city where globalisation and cyberspace mean that historic subcultural boundaries count for little.
Put another way: “this city is alive”.
So raps Bayang (tha Bushranger) on the opening track of his collaborative album with BRACT, REDBRICKGOTHIK.
“Cancerous clump of cells on sunburnt land/Malignant tumor/Exponential growth/We stop in rhythm to its jackhammer heartbeat/Festival of saltwater and concrete”, Bayang continues.
It’s no coincidence that the group featured at Soft Centre. With their scathing critiques of Sydney and their experimental approach to music making, reminiscent of Death Grips and local group Behind You, they encapsulate exactly the kind of creativity the experimental music and arts festival wants to promote.
Shifting the focus of Australians art from the white walls and polished floorboards of exhibition spaces and museums to the visceral euphoria of the rave, Soft Centre has revolutionised the presentation of public art. Gone are the polite hushed soundscapes of the art world and the static illumination of the traditional gallery.
Instead Soft Centre inserted into Carriageworks by sheer force of will a cacophony of discombobulating electronic music and experimental hip hop, and an avant-garde display of immersive lighting installations and performance art pieces. It has always been a risky venture.
Alongside the recent success of Mode Festival, however, Soft Centre’s 2023 edition demonstrates that Sydney’s appetite for the performing arts and experimental music runs deep.
Amber McCartney performs Baby Girl in the Carriageworks foyer at Soft Centre, 2023. Image courtesy: Jordan Munns.
Throughout the day Bay 17 was a site of majestic noise, sonic storytelling and otherworldly visuals. Following the Welcome to Country, the room was awash with natural soundscapes from bird calls to waves breaking on sand. At the meeting point between ancient and contemporary, Hand To Earth with vocalist Sunny Kim presented a moving modern interpretation of 40,000 year old song cycles from Southeast Arnhem Land. Flapping their arms and gliding like birds soaring in the sky, the silhouettes of Yolgnu songman Daniel Wilfred and Sunny Kim on the side walls of Bay 17 dwarfed the audience, lending the festival a distinctly spiritual opening.
Iranian producer Sote filled the room with glitched-out orchestral enormity, while Tarik Barri’s beat-responsive visuals brought the performance to a planetary level, as if creating a space opera. In a similar vein, Corin and Tristan Jalleh’s performance, inspired by György Ligeti’s score for 2001: A Space Odyssey, transported audiences to a new realm – one dominated by a priest-like black-robed figure with an alien crown.
Bay 20, where there were more intense rave and punk-centric offerings, was a celebration of dance music’s future. BRACT and Bayang (tha Bushranger) hit like a sucker punch to a Nazi. Opening with metal riffs and noise, the band whipped the crowd into a frenzy. It was a full quarter hour before Bayang, a true lyricist, even entered the stage.
It was entirely worth the wait.
“This is Western Sydney shit”, Bayang roared upon arrival. Over waves of bass, the bars that followed rang out crisp, an emphatic statement of intent and reclamation over what defines Sydney: radical politics, antiracist “skinhead shit” and a mouthful of attitude.
Mad miran and Cutting Room had the dancefloor rocking to hard percussion, IDM and left-field techno. The Soft Centre team even managed to sneak gabber into Carriageworks via Nerdie. Madness.
It’s difficult to pick any stand-out acts precisely because every single performance excelled.
The true genius of Soft Centre’s 2023 edition was not that you could step between worlds, basking in uplifting soundscapes one moment, observing dance performances in the foyer the next moment and head-banging to thrashing electric guitars in the final room. The true genius was that it worked, and all with a line-up near absent of white, straight, cis-gendered men.
Given, the bill leaned into certain sounds, bringing punk and metal into conversation with techno and hardcore. But, from the hyperpop of Daine to the anarchic digital hardcore of Deli Girls, Soft Centre platformed a thoroughly eclectic mix of sounds, video installations and performance art pieces that shared a common thread of resistance to the status quo without getting locked into one singular totalising expression of the zeitgeist. Bridging the gap between experimental art and the mainstream, it was an unapologetic freakshow display of outsider art and cyber-punk aesthetics.
Like a full-time (Gen Z) smoker sifting through a treasure trove of vapes and tobacco pouches, Soft Centre’s programming represents a complete disregard for labels and a sentiment of foreclosed futures. Contemporary youth struggles including atomisation under platform capitalism, algorithmic violence and generation-wide ADHD informed the line-up selection. In fact, for any neurotypical punters, it was as good an explanation as they will ever receive of what exactly ADHD is.
For a festival so focused on the darkness and ambiguity of contemporary existence within a late stage capitalist system and the extremities of music, it was the atmosphere of joy and optimism that stood out.
For those who bore witness, Bay 17 reached its apotheosis as Violent Magic Orchestra reduced audience members to tears. Thrusting the crowd outside of their comfort zone, seemingly beyond time and space itself, so entrancing was the performance, Violent Magic Orchestra delivered an event-wide conversion to their cult. As guttural shrieks, blast beats and interludes of industrial techno cleaved open the throng, disrobing those present, an undercurrent of euphoria washed away self-consciousness. Punters jumped up and down. Air-drummed. Shook their hands in the air as if dancing to Pentecostal preachers delivering a sermon. On the IMAX-sized projector screen behind the band, metallic humanoid figures moved in circles. Cartoon faces transformed into ghoulish beings. A band member – resplendent in spiked helmet – jumped into the crowd. Held up, Jesus-like, as ethereal melodies filled the cavernous hall, this moment, akin to satanic worship, perfectly captured the event’s manic energy.
Violent Magic Orchestra at Soft Centre, 2023. Image courtesy: Jordan Munns.
That this posse of doom and goth-centric artists were a late addition to the bill, following Slikback’s withdrawal, demonstrates the depth of knowledge the Soft Centre booking team possesses.
Next door, in Bay 20, meanwhile, a topless Danny Orlowski from queer-emo-club-punk act Deli Girls screeched antifascist messages into the mic.
From 9 PM, Carriageworks was filled with a soundtrack of anguish, torment and, critically, hope. Sydney’s creative were able to experience long-awaited catharsis. It was the perfect antidote to Sydney’s current cultural predicament.
There’s no shortage of muscle-tensing authoritarianism in New South Wales. Nanny state politics, red tape legislation, sky-rocketing policing fees for festivals, invasive strip searching and chronic underfunding have ravaged Sydney’s arts and hospitality industries.
Rent has sky-rocketed. In the surrounds of Carriageworks, the inner city, where public housing is rapidly disappearing, this issue is especially pronounced. According to Demographia’s International Housing Affordability 2023 Edition, Sydney is the second least affordable city in the world for home purchasing. When it comes to housing costs, no other Australian city compares.
Renowned on the global stage as a hub for financial services, a spawn point for corporate yes-men and wealthy boomers and a testing ground for ‘lockout laws’ – intense policing of hospitality and music venues to counter alcohol-fuelled night-time violence – this city of five million has almost no 24 hour clubs despite a wealth of pubs and bars. The 2022 Time Out Index – a survey of 20,000 city-dwellers – ranked Sydney as the third-worst city in the world for making new friends, and the second worst for nightlife. In short: Sydney is decidedly not a party destination.
For Soft Centre to grow within Sydney’s hostile arts climate, and not elsewhere in Australia, defies logic – at least at first glance. Fuelled by cautious optimism and a subversive desire for experimentation, Soft Centre represents a step into the unknown.
Danny Orlowski from Deli Girls performing at Soft Centre, 2023. Image courtesy: Jordan Munns.
Born out of DIY warehouse parties and unlicensed venues – the founders are frank about their event management origins - this one-of-a-kind festival has taken the unprecedented approach of shoving Sydney’s disruptive creative underclass into the public spotlight. It has also proven what can be achieved when government gives illegal party operators financial backing, legitimacy and international attention.
Criticism of overpriced tickets costs in an already-expensive city have plagued Vivid Sydney this year. But Soft Centre bucks the trend, presenting remarkably good value for money despite the $100 ticket price.
Who would have thought? Sydney’s young creatives have bailed out a state government accused of poor governance. The irony.
The after party was a rollicking roller-door-shaking celebration of Australian DJ talent. Performers catapulted themselves over the decks like gazelles and punters traded cigs in a car park filled with dented and trashed vehicles – the warehouse backs onto a smash repair. Donk World royalty, hard bass aficionados and breakcore degenerates Fareevader, who performed in clown make-up before stripping down to their underwear, had the warehouse bursting at the seams. The hipster convention became a hug convention.
If you’re in disbelief, just look at the Instagram of New Yorker Danny Orlowski from Deli Girls.
“SYDNEY IS TOO LIT went to fave rave… take notes”, they posted on their story.
Out of all Soft Centre events – and there have been a few now – the 2023 edition may just well have been the best one yet. It’s proof that Sydney can not only hold its own with the world’s best party cities; it can excel.
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