Dildo walls, a car crash and transcendent music: 24 hours at Dark Mofo 2025

Mixmag ANZ’s 24 hours in Nipaluna/Hobart for Dark Mofo 2025 opens with a portentous soundscape of synthesisers moving through loops. The night air’s cold, and there’s a red glow bathing the 4000-odd people gathered in an industrial Hobart location. Soon, the electronic tones, produced by the Brazilian composer André Abujamra, are buoyed by a big 4/4 kick drum, and the crowd’s heads are bobbing.

Distorted samples of a car engine are running through the soundscape, picked up from microphones strapped to the engines of two Audi TTs that accelerate towards each other until they collide in a horrific crash of twisted metal, shattered glass, and plumes of smoke. This isn’t a party at all; rather, it’s ‘Crash Body’, an artwork by the Brazilian performance artist Paula Garcia, who cautiously emerges from her decimated vehicle.

Such is a Dark Mofo, a festival that combines sound, image and experience unlike any other in Australia.

Over its 10 previous festivals, starting in 2013, Dark Mofo’s branding has become so well-defined that its iconography and aesthetics are likely well-known to even readers who haven’t attended. Its nights are filled with pagan overtures, blasphemous neons, baroque utterings, black metal, violence, blood and some pretty yum food. Electronic music and DJ culture have always been crucial ingredients in its cauldron.

Mixmag ANZ’s first real taste arrives a couple of hours after Garcia’s collision, at Altar bar – the multi-story venue which operates year-round as a crucial Hobart band room. Inside, Thaiboy Digital – member the Swedish rap group Drain Gang, whose early work inspired the trap-adjacent “cloud rap” subgenre – has the crowd fired up with his 2022 Yung Lean collaboration, ‘True Love’; and later, 2014’s ‘Shadow Silence’ drags even the most stoic lads into its bounce.

Thaiboy Digital’s set is further evidence of the way dance music’s influence is seeping well beyond its borders. Let’s call his closing tracks slow hard style, or hard slow style, I don’t know. What I do know is they felt equally adaptable to Melbourne shuffle or a Travis Scott pit.

Now this is where we need to stop for a moment, to explain some non-musical context leading into the festival this year. It's 11th outing, after a fallow year and its first under new Artistic Director Chris Twite (arriving after stints at Sydney Festival, Sydney Opera House, Brisbane Festival and Falls Festival), afforded the chance for a reset after some questionable programming by his predecessor, Leigh Carmichael.

Most notably, that was 2021’s cancelled and unequivocally offensive artwork ‘Union Flag’ by the Spanish shock artist Santiago Sierra, which asked First Nations peoples to send in vials of their blood to saturate a British Union Jack flag.

So in March, when the festival dropped its first tease on social media, many felt the festival hadn’t learned from its mistakes when it posted the following contextless quote by the genocidal 19th-century preacher George Augustus Robinson (Tasmania’s so-called ‘Chief Protector of the day for First Nations people) across its social channels: “What did you do with the bodies?”

Many felt the festival was once again using the historical horrors committed against First Nations people to market its festival and drum up publicity, horrors that are ongoing in the form of First Nations deaths in custody, among others.

It went on to announce later that the posts were advertising a new commission by the artist Nathan Maynard, a Trawlwoolway man, “We threw them down the rocks where they had thrown the sheep” – 480 decapitated and decomposing sheep heads in jars, stacked on shelves in a Hobart basement, representing the erasure, cultural theft and displacement of First Nations people; including the 1828 murder of 30 First Nations people at Cape Grim in retaliation for killing the same number of sheep, as recounted in Robinson’s quote.

In an era, particularly within dance music, where arts-aligned brands, events and festivals are being examined with a more discerning political eye than ever before, this context was palpable than ever at this year’s Dark Mofo.

I missed the festival’s first two smaller Night Mass parties in 2013 and 2014, but have attended at least one or more every time the notorious bacchanal has moved locations around the city, to varying levels of success. You’ll often hear people who attended those first parties lament their smaller scale, but there’s no going back. Night Mass: God Complex, as it’s known this year, is easily the event’s most ambitious staging.

When Dark Mofo jabs its horns into the Judeo-Christian, European settler cultural context of its millionaire founder, David Walsh, it’s undeniably successful. Perhaps it was at least in part born out of the necessity of finding a large space. Still, its choice this year to host Night Mass parties in a space formerly occupied by the Hillsong evangelical Christian cult felt like a delicious reincarnation of its upside-down crucifix taunts in 2018. After all, the key to successful satire is to punch up and not down.

Given Hillsong’s history of homophobia, including making damaging conversion therapy referrals for its followers up to 2011, the spectacle of crews of Queens holding court over the punters at Night Mass – or any number of other “sinful” acts being undertaken in the former Christian “youth arena” – was a joyful middle finger to religious exclusion and shame, and a reclamation of space at a moment in which Trans people are once more under attack.

And there were no set times posted within the venue. This makes planning a review for a genre-specific publication, such as Mixmag ANZ, difficult. So, the only option was to let the fever setting in at Thaiboy Digital fully take hold, be consumed by the sweats and dive in.

Upon entry, the crowd is flowing around the base of an industrial steel staircase, but a friend leads us up its steps. Soon, easily missed at the start of a maze of black plastic sheeting, we find ourselves in a 1970s kitchen complete with a fridge, pots, pans, wooden cupboards, a stove, and a cook clad in latex.

Hang on a minute.

The latex is lipstick red to match the trough of canned tomatoes I’m encouraged to reach into and pull fruit out of, to hurl at the hooded chef. Calling this person a sub feels inaccurate as they were very much in control of the situation (henceforth they shall be known as the Tom’ Dom). Fears of a different kind of fever emerged after instinctively licking the tomato sauce from my finger that everybody’s hands had been in. Still, the Tom’ Dom claimed the tomato acid possessed sterilising properties. Sure, it does.

Soon we’re back in the closed-off street, then up another staircase to Jennifer’s – a micro club dedicated to Hobart’s first sex shop owner. It was great when Pedro Pascal wore that “Protect the Dolls” shirt, but in this space, the dolls were entirely in charge. There was a small karaoke room (when I walked through, two Queens were taking on The Veronicas’ ‘Untouched’). In the main room, a DJ was playing a bass-heavy remix of Opus III’s ‘It’s a Fine Day’ in front of a glowing wall of dildos – rumoured to be the entire, crumbling deadstock of another sex shop. Jennifer’s felt like the definition of a safe space to retreat to, when the larger rooms became too hectic or the building’s tight corridors too overwhelming.

In Night Mass’s main rooms you can move between a live band like the electronic-industrial-tinged G.U.N., with their clattering programmed snares, rampant bass guitar and saxophone on the Rave Cave stage (decked out as a kind of cyber nightmare, with screens hung amongst an LED web of cables; and hiding down the back, a convenience store and internet cafe where you can play The Sims on old PCs); then to the main stage (actually two stages, stacked vertically into a sheer wall of what appears to be tinfoil) for Jamaica Moana, the Māori (Ngāpuhi/Tainui) and Samoan rapper and ballroom artist; and stick around for latin club from Carolina Gasolina.

Or you can brave the internal lines to access the smaller rooms, head up a warren of spindly staircases and crouch-walk through a corridor of old coats hanging from the roof to find yourself at the House Party stage and its adjoining rooms containing pillow fights and a chip sandwich bar. Saturday night was hosted by Naarm’s Content.net.au collective, featuring ethereal pop from Blood Lotus; blistering rap from the Guild crew (Sevy, Bayang, Grasp and Kalanjay); Voidhood’s post-punk; closed by a typically excellent Kuya Neil DJ set. It’s the best place to be all night and the hardest to reach.

And then, as you’re stumbling your way back downstair,s you find yourself twisting down a children’s slide to be spat back out onto the main room floor, then out the door, through the gates and into the night. The fever had broken, my eyebrows remained on my face (not the case for every party goer), and it was time for bed.

Depending on how you do Dark Mofo, you might leave Night Mass and wake up bleary-eyed for your flight the next morning, with flashes of the previous night’s encounters fluttering back into focus. But stay awhile if you can, because Hobart comes alive with some incredible peripheral off-program events for fans of club culture. There’s the now long-running Natty Waves boat cruise party for one, or the newly opened club, Ticcle, which programmed parties across the long weekend in its historic brewery location.

Up a few flights of stairs, you’ll find brick walls, exposed beams and an exceptional PA supplied by Pitt & Giblin. Seemingly rudimentary in construction compared to the Nipaluna company’s iconic cast-brass waveguides seen in DJ-focused bars like Naarm/Melbourne’s Waxflower, the small array of two each 12” and 15” monitors handling the mids and highs, with two deeply controlled 18” subs, offers astounding resolution for discerning dancers. Parties across the weekend at Ticcle were headlined by Wax’o Paradiso, Rev Lon and András. In short, don’t miss its next run coinciding with Dark Mofo’s second weekend, featuring Matrixxman, House Mum and Tim Heaney, among others.

Or for something laid back, Pitt & Giblin has publicly opened the doors to its showroom, as the temporary listening bar, Ours. There are drinks, DJs, and a Varia RDM40 rotary mixer running through Pitt & Giblin’s own towering, sculptural Tenet speakers.

Coming down the hill from Ticcle into the city, more Dark Mofo art was to be found in unusual locations, including in Hobart’s Central Church, where a colossal, shiny, porcelain-white, fibreglass goblin thot threw peace signs at a video work, Mortal Voice, which saw the artist Kalina Utomo chanel Javanese mythology by way of guttural howls.

...which is how Mixmag concluded its 24-hour goth schoolies; with a performance by the revered English DJ-producer and Skull Disco label founder, Shackleton, and the Indian virtuoso Hindustani classical singer Siddhartha Belmannu.

Initially commissioned by the Naarm nightclub Miscellania, the pair’s performance saw Belmannu run his extraordinary harmonium playing and breath-defying tonal vocal runs through a loop pedal, which fed into Shackleton’s midi-controllers and mixer. Together, they produced something approaching a post-colonial reverie, bridging cultures, melodies, and bass; computer-controlled and acoustic instrumentation; temporal, metaphysical, and earthly realms. Set the shock programming free, because this is where the festival’s strength lies.

As a journalist, fellow mainlanders you’ve known for a long time will come up to you throughout the festival, flabbergasted as to why Dark Mofo’s so good, and at why their city’s big arts festival doesn’t stack up. And it’s true, no other major Australian festival manages to continually program its events with such a delirious concentration of surprises, fun, mischief and genuinely challenging, often transcendent art.

Dark Mofo programs art works with real substance, whether it be visual artworks, electronic composers, Thai rap, or DJs working at the edge of their craft; and its visual art goes far beyond the trippy window dressing served up by other dance music festivals.

The challenge for the new Artistic Director, Chris Twite, and what will make the festival truly his own, is whether he can find a way to continue delivering on those strengths without repeating the mistakes of the past. Many would say that’s an Australian problem that runs deeper than any one man or festival, but we’ve got to do that work somewhere.

And if not at an arts festival, then where else?

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Nick Buckley is a freelance writer living in Naarm/Melbourne, find him on Instagram.