Dark Mofo 2022 review: Hobart’s hottest festival had plenty to get you off the mainland
‘Satanise your hands’ read the label, capturing in three words the anarchic daring of Hobart’s winter arts festival as it returns to full speed after lockdowns.
Not many Australian festivals can comfortably situate spaced-out rock ’n’ soul, war crimes confessions, booming hip-hop and spectral soundscapes from a nuclear power plant side by side. There might only be one: Dark Mofo.
For the first time since 2019, the Tasmanian arts and tourism flagship returned to its full strength, following a Covid cancellation in 2020 and a smaller offering last year that contained few international performers, and could not be attended by all Australians with our various travel restrictions.
Most of that is in the rear-view mirror, thankfully, although masks were commonly worn by festival attendees, staff and artists, and there were still plenty of dispensers at events offering the chance to “satanise your hands”, in line with its famously subversive branding that twists religious iconography.
Every festival program requires a few tentpoles on which to base a successful event. One of those was held on opening weekend, when Sydney-raised teenage hip-hop/pop sensation The Kid Laroi performed an arena show before thousands of fans, as he has done on the mainland in recent weeks.
While it was a coup for organisers to present the 18-year-old at the beginning of his world tour, Dark Mofo tends not to swing for chart-topping artists. Instead, its reputation is for booking lesser-known musical acts with cult followings, and then hope their exclusive appearance is enough to lure tourists to Tasmania.
Not that it’s a hard ask these days, even in the dead of winter, where single-digit temperatures are the norm. In the CBD and the fringes beyond, Hobart is one of the great Australian cities, and Dark Mofo’s request of local businesses to “paint the town red” by lighting their buildings and storefronts in shades of crimson and scarlet is enthusiastically taken up, particularly along the Salamanca waterfront, where much of the night-time activity takes place.
For me, the tentpoles this year were two shows – one exclusive, one shared with Vivid Live in Sydney – whose attraction was enough to make the trip south in search of artistic sustenance. Both met the task admirably, and plenty more besides.
On Thursday night, 800 people gathered at an industrial shed adjacent to a shipyard. The program had it named as The Plate Store, but the outside of the building reads College of Aluminium Training. Situated 8km north of the city centre, it looked like a place of manual work, sweat, machine noise and hard edges; in other words, a spot inner-city hipsters like me would have no reason to ever come, but for what Dark Mofo had booked to take place there.
For the 2019 HBO TV miniseries Chernobyl – centred on the true story and subsequent cover-up of what happened in the nuclear facility disaster – Icelandic composer Hildur Gudnadottir donned a Hazmat suit to source field recordings from a decommissioned nuclear power plant in Lithuania, then painstakingly reassembled those sounds into a score of remarkable resonance.
Soon after 8pm, Gudnadottir and four colleagues gently parted the thick crowd gathered around a central raised stage to begin performing her compositions from Chernobyl. On record, these works are cold, mechanical and largely characterised by an absence of melody; in concert, Gudnadottir’s voice was brought to the fore, as she sang wordless melodies drawn from what her microphones picked up inside the facility.
By opening with an extended version of a track named Waiting for the Engineer, Gudnadottir and co did something extraordinary: their soundscapes gave the effect of “powering on” the room itself, as guttural bass tones crawled from surround-sound speakers and overhead strobe lights flickered from one end of the shed to the other. Combined with plumes of smoke being pumped into the room, the effect was chilling and full of menace, as though a predatory animal was being woken from hibernation, none too happy about the disturbance.
All of this made my eyes prick with tears involuntarily, overwhelmed by the spectacle. These are the kind of moments you leave the house – leave the mainland – for, as a live event goer, hoping you’ll find something that makes you feel alive, exhilarated and a little scared, all at once.
The lighting was outstanding, and was a major part in why this was a show more felt than simply heard, especially during those smoke-filled moments where strobe lights flashed and visibility was momentarily zero. As well, there was the distinct novelty of 800 people standing in a dark room together, listening to a recreation of sounds recorded in Lithuania to soundtrack a spellbinding show about a man-made catastrophe.
All up, the five performers were on stage for about 45 minutes. It wasn’t all compelling; there were a few too many quieter suites of pure ambience where little was happening other than suspenseful tension. After the final note rang out, there was resounding silence until the composer whispered “thank you” into the microphone.
We had been a respectful and patient audience until this point, and the lack of applause breaks between movements heightened the sensation that we were watching people rebuild sounds captured from another, harsher and more desolate place on the other side of the world.
Although all proceeds from the performance will be donated to Voices of Children, a charity providing support to Ukrainian children and families affected by the Russian invasion, there was no political commentary; instead, only those alien, eerie sounds signposting the before-and-after of a different kind of disaster.
On Friday night, the other tentpole of my trip was held at Mac2, one of the bigger festival spaces, where more than 2000 people gathered for British band Spiritualized. In a set that leaned heavily on its two most recent releases – 2018’s And Nothing Hurt and the recently issued Everything Was Beautiful – the group underlined its reputation for layering expansive, soulful rock ‘n’ roll masterworks from humble beginnings, often only a few strummed chords and plaintive vocals from singer-songwriter Jason Pierce.
Backed by a five-piece band, including three electric guitars – and three women back-up singers – Spiritualized conjured a truly awesome sound at full stretch. On several occasions the music rose to a crescendo that gave the feeling of an aircraft sharply lifting off, as the players vamped for minutes on squalls of noise, feedback and pinballing percussion amid a storm of strobe lights.
After those eye-popping sections – once the spaceship descended and the crowd was caught somewhere between rapture and gratitude for sharing space with this remarkable band – Pierce merely turned a page on his music stand and readied himself for the next song. Seated and wearing sunglasses for the duration, as per usual, he presents as that rare egoless, aloof anti-rock star who feels no need to show off.
But to focus on Pierce is to miss the point a bit. His on-stage actions can be read as saying: don’t look at me, I’m a nobody – listen to what we’re making here.
What Spiritualized does is uncommon and unmatched, and the band leader has smartly surrounded himself with talented players to put these otherwise simple pop songs across with astounding force, drama and gravitas. Across two hours they repeatedly filled our cup, offering a singular blend of rock, soul, gospel and a touch of spaced-out psychedelia. Accompanied by a beautifully designed light show, this was a life-affirming concert and an inspired booking.
Among locals, the festival has long since been welcomed as something different to do during the otherwise long, sleepy southern winter, and the influx of blow-ins from the north island ensures Hobart is jumping at all hours in mid-June.
Signified by red neon crosses out front, there were a couple of dozen art installations and exhibitions within walking distance of the Hobart CBD, and of the handful I saw, one connected strongly.
“Can I ask you to talk a bit about the war today?” read the subtitle in a video interview shown on a small screen at the centre of Black Temple Gallery. An old Japanese man on screen smiled and gave an “A-OK” gesture with his fingers, and so began a harrowing testimony of the depravity he and his colleagues visited on the Chinese people during the Second Sino-Japanese War.
On two bigger screens side by side, the old man’s tearful, regretful memories were spoken and acted out by a series of young Japanese people. We heard and read stories of murder, gang-rape, torture, forced incest, decapitation, dehumanisation. One scene had several of the young actors shown only from the neck up, lined up in a major city somewhere, alternately whispering these horrifying confessions and frozen in place, as if dead.
Titled The Angels of Testimony, by Meiro Koizumi, it was a viciously confronting scene, one by which it was impossible not to be moved, and one that will stick to my mind like glue. Despite the instinct to look away, it felt like essential, transformative viewing.
Into the small hours of Saturday morning, Night Mass was a writhing cauldron of sound and energy, with smiles, booze and other party favours being shared in abundance. There, inside the Odeon Theatre, I happened upon a star in the making as the engaging Adelaide-based, Kenyan-born artist Elsy Wameyo sang and rapped up a storm while her tight five-piece band flexed its musical muscles. Hundreds of us stumbled across her late-night set, and I suspect a similar number walked away as new fans, too.
Last week, Dark Mofo’s creative director, Leigh Carmichael, told this newspaper that after 10 years at the helm, this might be his last festival in charge. Regardless of where he lands with that decision, what Carmichael and his team assembled in Hobart this year was another winner.
Two months ago, I wrote that Byron Bay Bluesfest was a joyful place to be as the first proper family-friendly, multi-day event to be held in Australia since the pandemic. Touring the various spaces comprising the sprawling Planet X precinct where Night Mass was held, Dark Mofo had the feel of an adults-only playground being fully reopened after a long closure, and the sense of gleeful abandon was palpable, as was the sense of friendly community.
The writer travelled to Hobart as a guest of Dark Mofo.