“I am very concerned that parents are subjecting their children at Dark Mofo to what I believe is [the] demonic and satanic culture that existed in the Dark Ages,”wrote one Lorne Geeves of Howrah last week, airing her concerns in a nigh-on hysterical letter sent to one of Hobart’s leading newspapers.
“Yes, our state is apparently benefiting, but at what cost to this unexplained confused weirdness?”
If Dark Mofo’s creative director hasn’t yet tagged “Unexplained Confused Weirdness” as the subtitle for next year’s festival, then they’re missing a trick. ‘Satanic’ and ‘demonic’ might be a stretch, but otherwise Ms. Geeves is more on point than she realises.
King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard
Dark Mofo isn’t like other festivals. There are thousands of festivals out there that people describe as ‘unlike other festivals’, but most of those people are liars. Dark Mofo doesn’t try to pander to a specific audience, or to chase the headliners that most organisers salivate over.
Dark Mofo isn’t about the latest chart-topper. It’s about raves that take place in funeral homes. It’s about auto garages overrun with dancers dressed as giant red lips. It’s about finding the things that scare us, and the things that excite us, and then mining the territory where those two emotions overlap.
2016’s iteration of the festival was no different. This year, Dark Mofo was about echoes. It was a rock being dropped in a well – a series of dark ripples that manifested on one evening as a frantic live show by a trio of assured metal acts, and on another as a series of string quartets being performed in a candlelit show on the darkest night of the year.
Audience members at Tim Hecker’sEphemera
The pleasures were oversaturated; the horrors were precise. On paper, the accomplished ‘continuous pianist’ Lubomyr Melnyk and King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard might not have anything in common, but both performers fired off shots at the same target, deliberately overloading their audience in order to trick them into bliss.
“You’ll know nirvana when you get there,” Melnyk said, “’cause it’ll be boring.” The first part proved to be true; the second an all-out lie. Nirvana, as Melnyk dished it out, was a thrilling, all-encompassing experience. Even the rapturous applause he received at the end of the show – the sound of thousands of hands clasped together in praise – was a weak imitation of the noise Melnyk had achieved all by himself. We were slower than he was. We could never hope to be half as fast.
Chelsea Wolfe
Chelsea Wolfe aimed for nirvana too, but her bliss wasn’t a destination to be reached – it was a creeping suggestion, a greatness that rose like a tide. By the time she laid waste to ‘House Of Metal’, turning the acoustic ballad into a towering, terrifying thing, it was as though everyone in the room suddenly realised what they were part of; as though the cogs discovered the scope of the machine. The previously docile audience exploded. The encore was long. It dripped.
A drummer at one of Dark Mofo’s many Blacklist parties
But the magic wasn’t simply confined to a stage. Parties broke out across Hobart like spot fires. A giant dragon stuffed with scrawled-down fears was paraded through the streets and then burnt. The Greasy Strangler, a strange, kitsch film about sex and death and also nothing at all, was screened to unsuspecting, perplexed audiences. The Winter Feast, a banquet held in a room lit by neon crosses, was haunted by punters and musicians alike – the former group chowing down on oozing mac and cheese while the latter performed from a special room set high into the wall.
Eddy Current Suppression Ring
And even the festival’s unavoidable highlight, the triumphant return of Eddy Current Suppression Ring, transcended the boundaries of normal performance space. Brendan ‘Current’ Huntley, a potent mix of tripped wires and forest fires, may have started out on a stage, but before long he was climbing the rafters and taking endless trips out into the audience, held aloft by their hands like he was a victory banner.
The band members were impossibly tight, relentless, determined, and a thousand more buzzwords that will never do justice to their prowess. Their music didn’t seem man-made, and, as the Ring launched about the stage, they didn’t seem human. They seemed possessed, fuelled and darkened by the night and by the festival. Maybe our mate Lorne Geeves was right – there might be something satanic about Dark Mofo after all.
Photographs by Brianna Elton
Dark Mofo 2016 took place in Hobart from Friday June 10 – Tuesday June 21. For a full gallery of photos from the festival, head here.
