Music review: Soft Centre: Supermodel Late Night, Now or Never Festival, Trades Hall

Everything, everywhere, all at once! Soft Centre: Supermodel Late Night in Now or Never Festival was like scrolling through TikTok, but instead of a barrage of brain-rot reels, we were live-scrolling through glimpses of stunning, experimental audiovisual experiences, sandwiched between bouts of navigating through the winding, jammed corridors of Melbourne’s Trades Hall. 

Hosting it in the Trades Hall was not the original plan. But as a reaction to the State Library’s crackdown on “political symbols” such as Indigenous or Palestinian flags and its cancellation of the Online Teen Writing Bootcamps, the Soft Centre team moved from the State Library to Trades Hall.

The night was, however, visibly impacted by this unexpected change to a smaller venue, which made messy logistics inescapable from what was already a jam-packed six hours. 

The Balit-Mil downstairs, the ETU Ballroom and the Solidarity Room upstairs were the three venues of the night, each with their own exciting but crammed line-ups that would have each individually warranted their own night for Now or Never Festival.

The spaces themselves, however, were even more packed, so much so that each venue had to be contained by security guards to prevent overflow, on a “one in, one out” basis, meaning there was constant traffic within the hallways. Sadly, a gentle and pretty performance on the stairways from Stacey Collee in an attempt to “deconstruct” the venue, sadly turned into a further roadblock for festival-goers.

And yet fortunately this did not completely overshadow the art. Though instead of rushing between shows and just catching glimpses of them, this reviewer was forced to completely miss shows from the likes of Salllvage and Harold.  

The ETU Ballroom was the largest of the venues, featuring a massive screen behind the stage, designed to present audiovisual experiences through collaboration – musicians teaming with visual or body artists to enhance each other’s work. Highlights included Hulubalang and Brandon Tay’s set, in which Kasimyn from GMO (Gabber Modus Operandi) really found his voice as a solo artist, playing a unique ritualistic blend of distortion and percussion, and Tay complementing it with some visual manipulations of ghostly black-and-white figures that operate in the Hulubalang lore.

The ETU Ballroom audiovisual experience culminated with the Stack piece from a Naarm-based dream team of Female Wizard, Eek, Harrison Hall and Sam Mcgilp. Female Wizard’s abstract body art and heavy beats were accompanied by a set of sparkling and striking visuals from Eek and managed to make sense of the space. 

The Solidarity Room was a personal favourite and ultimately where this reviewer stayed the longest. It started out with the quirky Machine Listening, an audience-assisted butoh-esque sound performance, which needed some getting used to at first, but the incomprehensible and seemingly random sounds slowly presented themselves as a deeply thought-out improvised composition. 

Jessika Khazrik presented a nightmarish deconstructed club set with heavy, pounding darbuka fluttering all around it, sonically presenting intention behind her Cartography of Darkness project. Techxodus was truly spectacular and a favourite of the entire night, while Balit-mil was a sleepy, low-sensory space that really put the “soft” in Soft Centre. It provided a respite and contrast for the high-energy happening upstairs, for those who needed it and could make their way there. 

Soft Centre: Supermodel Late Night was a confusing time, frustration mixed with wondrous jubilation. What could have been two full days’ worth was packed into six hours, which wasn’t ideal and a reminder that sometimes less is more.

Time was needed to breath and to digest some of the incredible art.

Read: Festival review: Now or Never 2024 wrap

And considering the 11th hour venue change, far from a lost opportunity, and with Soft Centre potentially learning from its ambition goal, the event really has the potential to join the likes of Unsound and CTM as one of the world’s great experimental music festivals. 

Soft Centre: Supermodel Late Night took place on 31 August 2024 as part of Now or Never Festival.