Soft Centre

Following their first outing in 2022, SOFT CENTRE Festival returns to Vivid Sydney with a full precinct takeover of Carriageworks.

Traversing leftfield club, noise and ambient music, alongside experimental dance and endurance performances, live A/V concerts, digital art and large-scale lightworks, SOFT CENTRE is a multi-sensory festival experience unlike any other. Ecstatic, extreme and staunchly experimental, the program presents an eclectic mix of cutting-edge creators from the local and global underground.

Highlights include kaoss.in, a collaborative A/V performance between Finnish duo Amnesia Scanner (PAN) and digital provocateur Freeka Tet. Characterised by a deep fascination with system vulnerabilities, informational overload, and sensory excess, this closing concert fuses grotesque online aesthetics in hyper detailed 16K fantasy colour with AS' signature avant-EDM sound. NTS resident and club iconoclast aya (Hyperdub) presents a new live set, contorting language, dialect, gender and sexuality between controlled bursts of rhythm, noise and aural goop. Combining barbed industrial dancefloor forms with nu-metal, rap and noise, NY duo deli girls make their long-awaited Australian debut. Spanning continents and cultures, Hand to Earth is a rare collaboration between Yolgnu songman, Daniel & David Wilfred and Korean vocalist Sunny Kim, who sing in their native languages over hypnotic soundscapes composed by Peter Knight & Aviva Endean. 

Bay 17 will house a mammoth 22m projector screen for immersive A/V performances, including VOID a collaboration between Kenya's deconstructed club pioneer Slikback and longtime Aphex Twin VJ Weirdcore. DIY Queer filmmakers Garden Reflexxx accompany ambient composer Lydian Dunbar (Tralala Blip, Room 40) and Corin (UIQ) x Tristan Jalleh present the Australian premiere of Lux Aeterna, exploring the possibilities of a heightened collective consciousness in times of crisis.

Renowned for their unique collaborations, SOFT CENTRE will also showcase a suite of newly commissioned cross-disciplinary works. Needlemouth sees Marcus Whale playing a hungry ghost plagued by insatiable desire alongside Eugene Choi, with costuming by Megan Hanson; Gamilaraay rappers T-Breezy and Walkerboy team up with Trackwork's label boss Utility, previewing tracks off their hotly anticipated forthcoming mixtape ‘South's Most Wanted, and Harrison Hall + Sam Mcgilp team up with Prairie WWWW, a Taipei-based media art collective, to present BC, a hybrid live/digital dance work of impossible choreography, biomimicry and techno-morphology.

Secure your tickets and scope the rest of the program through the Carriageworks website.