Waiting for NME after stepping off the plane for Dark Mofo 2023 is a cavernous hangar on the docks of nipaluna/Hobart. Inside are 240 stretchers fitted with a mattress, crisp white sheets, pillows and blankets. We’re here for SLEEP, a composition by the German-British composer Max Richter, running from midnight until 8AM the next day. It’s a slow hypnosis: Richter and members of the American Contemporary Music Ensemble repeat a musical phrase, almost imperceptibly altering it as it builds in volume. Strings creep in above the keys and the soprano Grace Davidson’s angelic call infiltrates your slumber.
SLEEP was a gentle entry into the lutruwita/Tasmania winter festival, which can whiplash your senses through awe, wonder and revulsion. Now in its 10th year, Dark Mofo has seen many controversies: most recently the commission of the work Union Flag in 2021 from the Spanish artist Santiago Sierra. Union Flag asked Indigenous people to donate their blood, into which would be dipped a Union Jack flag.
After widespread uproar (A.B. Original rapper and Yorta Yorta man Briggs: “We already gave enough blood”), it was ultimately canceled. The festival’s response included a $60,000 seed fund for First Peoples commissions, which this year helped fund the Yirramboi co-production, Kin, featuring the work of six Koorie and palawa artists. And this year Dark Mofo saw 13 performances or presentations of First Peoples’ work, involving more than 30 First Nations artists and musicians including Tasman Keith, Barkaa, Dameeeela and more.
Among the many valid criticisms of Union Flag was the feeling a First Peoples artist would have been a more appropriate commentator on colonial violence, rather than one whose country partook in its own blood-soaked colonisations of indigenous peoples. At Dark Mofo 2023, two works by Curtis Taylor – a filmmaker, visual artist and Martu man – validated that argument.
Ngarnda, a single-channel video, depicted Taylor cloaked in night, rivulets of blood streaming over his head and face in an outward expression of his internal world. Boong placed its largely white audience in a room surrounded by car bullbars, blazing headlights and a soundtrack of violent racial slurs. Both powerful, visceral works expressed a lived experience of colonial violence and were meaningfully challenging as a result.
Dark Mofo is as much about music as it is visual art, and magic happens when those mediums co-exist. The Indonesian contemporary visual artist Tisna Sanjaya created messy, brilliant explosions of paint and powder on batik fabrics while a group of Sundanese musicians, dancers and instrument builders entranced onlookers. A performance by the husband-and-wife duo of Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo and visual artist Leah Singer saw Ranaldo bathed in Singer’s dramatic projections, as he bowed, bashed and swung a Fender guitar hanging from the roof in a graceful tornado of feedback and drone.
More straightforward sets included Deafheaven’s 10-year anniversary performance of the band’s beloved shoegaze scream-fest, ‘Sunbather’; Loraine James’ set of layered, textural IDM, UK club sounds and R&B; and the Belarusian band Molchat Doma’s exceptional Depeche Mode-indebted synth pop.
On to Night Mass. Dark Mofo’s annual takeover of several nipaluna city blocks, venues and alleyways is also a chaotically good party (queues aside) full of wild visions: a giant teddy bear with laser beam eyes; a shibari artist hampered by hip-to-heel bungee cords, with a giant paintbrush strapped to their head; vintage gay porn, including a remarkable blowjob scene, set to classical music; an underground cinema turned vaudeville theatre; and an alleyway street rave.
For our part, we bunkered down in the gritty, multi-storied venue Altar for ripping local sets from the one-true anti-capo sermoniser, Our Carlson; Big Wett’s horny electroclash revival; set upon set of relentless techno in the upstairs club; and grindcore clowns Axon Breeze (read more about their set here).
As mentioned earlier, whiplash at Dark Mofo is inevitable. A snap came violently on Saturday night at the now-annual showcase of outlier electronic music, curated by Berlin Atonal. Standing before a shifting aurora, the Italian modular synthesist Caterina Barbieri had just taken the audience to the cusp of an event horizon with a galactic, expansive set. But the mood swiftly turned as the British experimental choreographer, rapper and producer Blackhaine writhed, projected on the stage screen, from what resembled a makeshift detention centre cell.
Blackhaine soon burst from a shipping container at the room’s rear, which revealed glaring white light and a DJ. From atop the containers the towering Blackhaine agonisingly contorted his vocal chords and pale frame. It was a jaw-dropping opening salvo of image, illusion, movement and sound.
As the intense strobe lighting flashed, an audience member next to NME collapsed. Paramedics arrived from their station outside the venue and the artists, appearing unsure, continued their performance. Blackhaine first led the crowd away, but repeatedly returned to the site of the emergency, grabbing a bottle of whiskey in one fist and stalking the scene. Then, directly in front of NME the musician spat on the ground next to the paramedics – a shockingly ugly split-second in a heightened, highly aggressive performance and production.
Dark Mofo works when it creates a safe space to explore the dark, esoteric, confrontational, explicit and rarely explored reaches of the human condition. Blackhaine’s set was my first time in five festivals where proximity to those expressions felt unsafe. NME approached Dark Mofo and Blackhaine, through the festival, for comment on this incident. In a statement supplied to NME the festival said: “A patron unfortunately collapsed during Blackhaine’s performance at the festival this year. Paramedics attended and treated the patient, and an ambulance was called to transport the person and their friends offsite.
“The festival follows Live Performance Australia guidelines, with trained operators supervising use of lighting, as well as audience warnings at point of ticket purchase and in the venue advising that laser and/or strobe lights will be used. Patron safety is always our priority.” In a second statement, Dark Mofo added that “warnings were specified on the ticket purchase page, and also on digital tickets. Signage specifying warnings was posted at every entry point to the venue.”
Believe it or not, it’s not the blood, guts and excrement (all of which featured start to finish in the festival’s nonetheless extraordinary headline theatre production, Florentina Holzinger’s A Divine Comedy) that have stayed with me from my trips to Dark Mofo. Were the festival to do away with worst of the shock and horror, its “Dark Mofo-ness” could still remain intact, because it’s the tender, inexplicably moving moments that remain lodged in one’s memory.
A smattering among many in 2023 included Jason Phu’s cast of mangled animatronic toys in the installation Without Us You Would Have Never Learnt About Love, which reminded me of childhood viewings of deliciously frightening stop-motion films with my puppeteer mum; or my first meaningful, full-mind-body encounter with yoga at NYX and DO.OMYOGA’s drone-soundtracked asana session; and yes, eight hours of restorative bliss at SLEEP.
With the knowledge that moments like these lie in wait, it’s hard to resist the pull, year after year, to this cold island’s mad festival. Dark Mofo can be infuriating, offensive, shocking and miraculously beautiful. It’s all of those things and more.
NME travelled to Dark Mofo as a guest of the festival from June 15-18. Dark Mofo 2023 concludes June 22