Dark Mofo drops “most ambitious” lineup

Photo: Remi Chauvin

Buoyed by fresh funding, Tasmania’s largest music and arts event, the winter solstice festival Dark Mofo (June 8–21) has dropped what it calls “the most ambitious” of its bills.

The festival, set up five years ago, has a target of an attendance of 500,000 by 2021 (from 2015’s 280,000) and aims to build up its interstate and international visitors to 20,000 by the same year.

The cutting edge program has a loose theme of “silence”, including an official Day of Silence on June 19.

In addition to the already-announced Norway doom metal group Ulver (who’re also pairing with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra for Messe IX-VI.X), the music component of the eclectic and often radical bill, are Scotland’s Mogwai and seminal German actEinstürzende Neubauten.

Paul Kelly, Irish singer Camille O’Sullivan, and pianist and composer Feargal Murray perform songs inspired by 100 years of Irish letters, and A.B. Original are supported by Thelma Plum at the Odeon.

US experimental outfit Xiu Xiu recreates Angelo Badalamenti’s score to the cult TV series Twin Peaks.

Death metal acts from around the world, Taake, Anaal Nathrakh, Grave Miasma, Barshasket, and Mournful Congregation join together for Hymns To The Dead.

Buried Country features 13 indigenous Australian performers bringing to life author Clinton Walker’s book on the history of Indigenous country music.

Borderlands is a musical and cinematic collaboration between Swedish producer Klara Lewis, Italy-based former Nine Inch Nails member Alessandro Cortini, US guitarist Grouper, and Australian composer and media artist Lawrence English.

The sound project Siren Song by Byron J Scullin and Supple Fox will be broadcast through 550 loudspeakers across the Hobart waterfront at sunrise and sunset each day.

A non-music attraction is UK-based Canadian laser art pioneer Chris Levine, whose project 136.1 Hz will shoot giant technicolour lasers 10km into Hobart’s sky to “create intersections that reflect the science of particle physics and sacred geometry”.

Of new additions, the late night Blacklist club is replaced by the Red Bull Music Academy transforming Hobart City Hall into an industrial-scale rave party called Transliminal, with light installations by Robin Fox.

Also making a bow is the multi-venue art party Welcome Stranger, with a mix of “feminist punk, avant-choreography, ecosexual bathing and woodchopping”.

Last year, Dark Mofo received a one-off $2.1 million funding injection from the Government through Events Tasmania.

The City of Hobart announced a three-year support package. It provided $300,000 last year; and $200,000 – made up of $150,000 in cash and $50,000 worth of in-kind support – in both 2017 and 2018.

It meant the festival could extend its dates, and also spend $250,000 a year on programming.

More ambitious projects can be attracted and staged across the Hobart waterfront from Salamanca to the Dark Park art precinct at Macquarie Point.

Dark Mofo injects $46 million into the economy and creates about 400 new jobs, both full time and short term contracts.

More details at https://darkmofo.net.au/.