The Royal Exhibition Building is about enormity. It’s a giant space, among the biggest indoor venues in Melbourne and originally designed to “welcome all nations” during the World’s Fair in 1880.
As soon as attendees walked into the Great Hall for the 2024 Now or Never festival, they were greeted by an enormous set of speakers, on top of a large pair of projection screens overlooking a massive stage.
All four acts of the night (22 August) were challenged to take over the space with sounds and visuals large enough to fill every corner of the Great Hall – a difficult task, but one that all four succeeded in accomplishing with flying colours.
CORIN (Corin Ileto) kicked off the show through cinematic electronic compositions from her Lux Aeterna project. The brooding electronic loops helped ease the crowd into the sheer volume that would carry the night. Eventually they were accompanied by heavy, pulsating drum beats. It easily could have been a soundtrack for a cyberpunk movie, backed by ethereal and futurist visuals from Tristan Jalleh. As the first set, Ileto paved the way for the next artists on the list.
Next up, Ben Frost’s monstrous synthesisers alongside Greg Kubacki’s crunchy guitar provided an explosion lying somewhere between the music genres of nu-metal, djent and drone. At times, it felt like the columns in the Great Hall were shrieking around us. Their reactive, aggressive and monochrome visuals only made the sound waves feel even more present.
Yet, Frost and Kubacki managed to maintain a closeness with the audience, even within a genre notorious for wedging a gap between performer and the crowd. When they shouted ‘yeah’ into the mics in moments of silence, it was an unintentional reminder of what “normal” volume is.
Eartheater provided a much needed breather for the crowd, where front woman Alexandra Drewchin even expressed a tongue-in-cheek surprise that the windows hadn’t shattered! Thankfully for the windows, Eartheater took a gentler and more human approach to high volume. Drewchin’s soft, sensual voice tinged with nostalgia and melancholy felt reminiscent of Lana Del Rey, if she had delved into ambient soundscapes and unpredictable electronic loops. Those ethereal electronic loops helped enhance the beauty in Drewchin’s voice, making audiences feel as if they were witnessing the action from inside a soothing crystal ball.
During Eartheater’s set, Luke George’s acrobatic shibari (Japanese bondage) performance was occurring on the other side of the Great Hall. A twirling “bunny” was tied with glowing green bondage ropes and mounted up near the roof, displayed in a statuesque manner evoking the atmosphere of an artsy circus. Sadly, it went under the radar for many attendees and felt like an “easter egg” for those who chose to sit down further away from Eartheater’s set. It certainly deserved as much attention as the performers and was a sensational piece of performance art.
The night culminated with Indonesian duo Gabber Modus Operandi, who conjured up a glowing finale through their spectacular, high-energy fashion and their speedy blend of Balinese folk and gamelan with footwork and gabber. Their deeply refreshing and non-Western approach to distortion provided a really spellbinding and hypnotic feeling, presenting noise in ways that would surprise even veteran black metal fans. The dualism between front man Ican Harem’s grindcore-esque shrieking, and DJ Kasimyn’s graceful calmness balanced everything out.
They were accompanied by Brandon Tay’s visuals featuring nightmarish AI clips from Indonesian TikTok morphing into glitchy, futuristic demons straight out of traditional folklore.
Read: Performance review: Interior by Rawcus, The Substation
At the end of the night, I found it took a while to readjust my eyes and ears to normality. Not due to tinnitus or blurry vision, but returning to my senses from a state of being hyper-engaged and enamoured with everything around me.
This Now or Never takeover of the Royal Exhibition Building seamlessly blended large-scale visual projections with reverberating audio to create an experience that touched your very core.
Ben Frost/CORIN/Eartheater/Gabber Modus Operandi performed at the Royal Exhibition Building on 22 August as part of Now or Never Festival 2024.
