The gnarled bony fingers of the corpse of the ubiquitous Dark Mofo Festival have gently shoved aside the dusty lid of its sarcophagus and has sat bolt upright as the details of the program for 2025 have been released. The Nosferatu of antipodean winter festivals – the original and in my humble opinion the best – suffered, as did we all – a COVID-induced narcolepsy, a brief gasp of life as it emerged blinking out the other side, then a hiatus last year as a new Director, Chris Twite, took over the reigns. With the demise of the summer festival MONA FOMA festival, many held their breath fearing permanent burial but hope sprung eternal with the announcement last year confirming the reanimation of the corpse. And now the gory details are unfurled.
Twite says of the Festival:
‘Dark Mofo is back! Once again we will bathe the city in red, filling it with art and taking over disused and hidden spaces all across Nipaluna/Hobart. Night Mass—the late-night labyrinth of revelry—will carve new paths through the city and a host of Australian-exclusive artists from around the world will storm our stages.
It feels incredible to bring so many boundary pushing artists to Tasmania in 2025 for the fullscale return of Dark Mofo.
The festival will commandeer deconsecrated churches, rooftops, basements, bars, bank vaults and the shores of River Derwent. Dark Mofo will also stretch its tentacles to a theatre in Launceston and the planetarium in Ulverstone.
There has been a major shift across Australia as other States have tried to emulate the success of Dark Mofo with their own Winter Festivals (think Sydney’s VIVID Festival, Melbourne’s Rising Festival and Brisbane’s Winter Festival). One unfortunate side effect in these economically straightened times is that the international appearances now tend to be treated as part of one major tour, with less exclusivity.
Thus the Dark Mofo program has some artists that are touring across the country’s various (lesser) Winter Festivals but there are some tasty exceptions, and after all, Dark Mofo has never been exclusively about the music but about the creation of an extraordinary cultural event that reanimates the southern gothic capital in the depths of the cold dark winter. Excuse the slight exaggeration – it has, in the ten years, I’ve been going getting a little horrendously warmer each year. Thanks, Climate Change.
This year the exciting festival is featuring exclusive shows from The Horrors and Crime & The City Solution amongst a panoply of performers. The full program is available here.
A full description of musical performers include:
Beth Gibbons (GBR) opens this year’s music program with two shows at The Odeon, 17 years after the release of her last album with iconic trip-hop act Portishead.
One of 19 Australian-exclusive music performances, Philly wordsmith Tierra Whack* (USA) sculpts surreal worlds in rap and R&B, where shifting moods spill into theatrical hooks and technicolor fantasies.
The Australian premiere of Landscape from Memory* by experimental electronic musician Rival Consoles (GBR) brings waves of euphoric synth and deep ambience.
Darkwave’s modern torchbearers Cold Cave* (USA) bring their shimmering underground synth-pop and noise, and Boy Harsher* (USA) will take us to the murky depths throbbing with desire and loneliness.
The thunderous, cathartic progressive metal of Baroness* (USA) will wash over the Odeon. Hymns to the Dead* returns for another chapter of blistering sound—uniting the furious Quebecois black metal debauchery of Spectral Wound (CAN) with New York’s dissonant avant-death miscreants Imperial Triumphant (USA), black metal makers Hulder (USA) and swamp death spectacle Slimelord (GBR). Clown Core* (USA), meanwhile, is a breakneck fusion of jazz, extreme metal and absurdist mayhem.
Zeitgeist-shaking garage goths The Horrors* (GBR) will conjure industrial mantras while art-punk progenitors Crime & the City Solution* (AUS) + (DEU) sing songs that are cinematic and lyrical. At Borderlands*, Lisa Gerrard (a founding member of Dead Can Dance), Cye Wood + William Barton proffer the first live performance of their project ‘Under In Between’—a sonic journey that resonates through blood, flesh, and bone.
From New York, the trio Show Me The Body* (USA) bring their ceremonial hardcore and banjo, while Machine Girl* (USA) will craft furious digital hardcore for the collapse of civilisation.
Surfacing from the Chicago underground, existential industrial rap duo Angry Blackmen are storytellers too, delivering American horror tales smacked over glitchy beats.
Enter a lush oblivion with American DIY indie-rockers DIIV (USA) or wade towards Mancunian saxophonist and poet Alabaster DePlume* (GBR), who transmits sonorous gems in warm waves.
Get lost in the heart-spilling sincerity of experimental outsider LUCY (Cooper B Handy)* (USA) or the dream-spun folk reveries of Jessica Pratt (USA), an LA songstress who inhabits the shadows of California’s psychedelic past.
The German capital’s venerated music festival Berlin Atonal* curates new project Nox Omnia, transforming the limited capacity Playhouse Theatre into a sit-down journey of hypnagogic, experimental soundscapes.
At Federation Concert Hall, co-artistic director and conductor of the London Contemporary Orchestra, Robert Ames (GBR), curates a symphony of abstract waterscapes—melodic streams, trickling textures, currents of creation and dissolution—performed by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra (AUS).
Thaiboy Digital (THA), a member of the mythical Drain Gang, brings feverish melodies with a gritty undercurrent, while Mong Tong* (TWN) combines Southeast Asian folklore and dreamy psychedelia.
AGENESIS by Robert Curgenven + Kat McDowall (AUS + IRL) is a baptism of light—phasing audiovisual patterns that pull you into a trance, where sensory perception fractures.
Hailing from the remote community of Papunya, northwest of Alice Springs, Luritja singer-songwriter Keanu Nelson (AUS) spins revelatory audio portraits of place. The classical Hindustani vocals and fluid drones of Shackleton (GBR) + Siddhartha Belmannu (IND) tilt at transcendence.
Noisy and hypnotic Gut Health (AUS) presents dance-punk from the Naarm underground, while Forest Swords’ (GBR) form immersive electronic landscapes from the post-industrial guts of Liverpool.
Pioneering death industrial project Brighter Death Now (SWE) and experimentalist Evicshen (USA), who makes her own electronic instruments, create voids of noise with support from Tongue Dissolver (AUS).
Divide and Dissolve’s (AUS) churning riffs and crunchy feedback are paired with the catgirl death industrial of Uboa (AUS), and darkwave with a Slavic edge by ŽIVA (AUS) (HRV). Post-punk rockers The Peep Tempel (AUS) break a long hiatus with raw portraits of life in the burbs.
* denotes Australian exclusive.
Tickets go on sale to subscribers 10am Wednesday 9 April AEST and to everyone else from noon on Wednesday 9 April AEST. Subscribe for updates at www.darkmofo.net.au.
This is an outstanding program and it is great to see the life back in the Festival.
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