Dark Mofo, light spirits
The Hobart festival of out-there art lifted and tested patrons.
It was a bearded wildman from Ballarat who, in the midst of a rock ’n’ roll maelstrom, summarised the mission statement behind Dark Mofo: build it and they will come, intoned Warren Ellis, the violinist and frontman of Dirty Three. This was what led Museum of Old and New Art founder David Walsh to splash his cash on a range of artistic endeavours without profit as the primary goal, from the museum on the River Derwent to the annual festival now in its seventh iteration.
Nowhere was that spirit of applying the paddles to jolt a city from its prior slumber more apparent than on Saturday at the Winter Feast, held at Princes Wharf, where thousands of people of all ages gathered to eat and drink at long tables beneath glowing red crosses. In the days ahead, a cruise ship from Sydney was set to arrive in Hobart, depositing thousands more mainland souls on to the island to experience what has become one of Tasmania’s great tourist attractions.
Ellis and his bandmates, guitarist Mick Turner and drummer Jim White, played two Sunday shows to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their debut album Dirty Three. On record, its seven tracks run for 49 minutes, but on both occasions at the Odeon Theatre it reached two hours thanks to Ellis’s fondness for colourful anecdotes introducing each song, as well as the instrumental trio’s preference for extending each arrangement as long as deemed necessary.
While the middle of the set exhibited a more sedate, meditative side of the band, as violinist Ellis switched to piano accordion for Odd Couple, album opener Indian Love Song and closer Dirty Equation were both struck through with a fearsome electricity. With a guitar pick-up attached to his violin and a bow that acted as a lightning rod, Ellis was a constant focal point as his body jerked to the singular storm of sound that makes Dirty Three one of the greatest live bands to exist.
While that was the musical highlight of the festival’s second weekend, Chilean-American artist Nicolas Jaar wasn’t far behind with a world premiere performance on Saturday night under his pseudonym Against All Logic. At the waterfront venue MAC2, Jaar constructed a masterly set of electronic music that contained few melodies or vocal samples but instead relied on incremental changes in his arrangements to remain utterly compelling across two hours. Ringed by a battery of lights artfully deployed to use darkness just as much as shades of red and white, Jaar’s decision to situate the stage in the middle of the room resulted in a communal experience of euphoria.
Conversely, inside the same venue on Friday night, British singer-songwriter FKA Twigs achieved those extraordinary heights just once, during Two Weeks, when a wall-to-wall synth wash met dense bass notes and her extraordinary voice soared above it all. The 90 minutes leading up to that moment contained few other goosebump-inducing features, however.
Her stagecraft, whether she was alone or accompanied by several dancers and musicians, often came across as stilted, as if she were performing for a mirror inside a rehearsal space rather than before several thousand humans itching to be moved by an immersive headline show. This wasn’t that, unfortunately. Instead, large sections of her show were tedious and bloodless and, in turn, much of the capacity crowd seemed restless. As reported by attendees of her Sydney show at Carriageworks, the lavish production and regular costume changes meant that her show might have been better suited to a seated venue, where the work could be better studied and appreciated.
For her encore, Twigs returned to perform recent single Cellophane solo, standing before a red curtain, with her voice scaling wicked heights. At its end, she appeared to be genuinely moved by the adoration sent her way, and wiped away a tear. But for that moment and the group hug that she and her fellow performers fell into as they were hidden by the final curtain, though, her show had about as much warmth as the single-degree climate outside.
Afterwards, at Night Mass inside the Odeon Theatre, Sydney-based artist Sampa the Great was positively radiant. Fresh from her first concert tour of Africa, including a show in her homeland Zambia, the artist born Sampa Tembo has quickly become one of the strongest performers in the national hip-hop scene. After opening with stunning recent single Final Form, she aired a selection of tracks from 2017 album Birds and the Bee9 and earlier EPs. Backed by a drummer, guitarist, keyboardist and two backing vocalists, as well as two occasional dancers, her smooth, sunny music was an ideal match for the party-ready mood near midnight.
At the Federation Concert Hall on Saturday, Icelandic artist Jonsi — best known as singer and guitarist of Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Ros — and his partner Alex Somers performed their 2009 ambient album Riceboy Sleeps backed by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra.
Together, dozens of musicians combined to produce a work of striking beauty and delicacy. At the other end of the spectrum, Swedish doom metal pioneers Candlemass performed in Hobart for the first time since the group was founded in 1984, and its distinctive, bass-heavy sound attracted a modest but vocal crowd of devotees at the Odeon Theatre late on Sunday night.
Outside of the concert venues, a series of free art installations was scattered across the city centre, including Mike Parr’s Towards a Black Square, which wasn’t quite the conversation starter of his work last year, where he was buried alive beneath Macquarie Street for three days without food. This time, he was moved to keep his eyes closed for 7½ hours while painting dozens of black squares on to the white walls of the newly opened Detached Artist Archive, situated at the former home of local newspaper The Mercury.
Inside a deconsecrated church at Black Temple Gallery, Gippsland artist Paul Yore’s It’s All Wrong But It’s Alright prompted more immediate admiration, at least at first: designed as a shrine to sex, excess and garish colour, and composed of thousands of found and collected objects, its flashing lights and looping soundtrack soon induced a kind of sickly feeling redolent of the poker machine room at your local pub.
British artist Jimmy Cauty’s The Aftermath Dislocation Principle was much more accessible than Parr’s idea, too. The artwork took the form of a graffiti-covered shipping container peppered with peepholes through which viewers could observe a desolate, miniaturised British town in the aftermath of a riot, complete with blue lights and thousands of tiny police officers wearing fluoro vests.
At the bottom of a list of “facts and rules of engagement” pasted to the side of the shipping container was this item: “No one must ever dictate, pronounce or try to explain the full meaning of the ADP. The ADP can only be seen and discussed. It can never be ‘known’.” Despite the clear sense of irony and playfulness with which those 31 facts and rules were written, something about that ethos for elusiveness rings true.
Dark Mofo concludes on Sunday. Andrew McMillen travelled to Hobart as a guest of the festival.