PULP is a multimedia arts and culture magazine, based on Gadigal land.
BROWSE BY ISSUE
Would you drop acid at the university chapel?
A howling March southerly pushed cold air and bouts of rain through the streets. It turns out that this weather was perfect for the haunting melodies and evocative art pieces I was about to witness at White Bay Power Station for Sydney Biennale’s Art After Dark.
So why were we all there? Because ZS is a person even more interesting than the characters she writes. She is one of the greatest essayists of our time.
I couldn’t ignore what seemed like the ultimate patriarchal irony: that women are the ones expected to do the labour—of going to the Opera House, booking therapy appointments, monitoring children’s social media usage—to ‘fix’ masculinity.
The room became very still after that. It was one of several moments in the evening where the audience seemed to move beyond polite attentiveness into something heavier.
This Opera House show was expected to be a repeat of his performance at Carnegie Hall in New York: stripped bare of everything but the music and a sense of cultural occasion.
On Friday the 13th of February, full of spite from the working day, I stumbled down the stairs of the Cellar Theatre and sat my arse down on a metal bleacher for what would turn out to be the best evening of my week.
The sprinkling of water sent outfits into disarray, leaving hair a little more frazzled, makeup a little less blended, and everyone a little more ready to throw themselves around a dance floor.
As this performance explored the common myth of the changeling baby, it interrogated the way that myths justify the othering of individuals who live outside of social norms…
Part family drama, part psychological thriller, Stephen Karam’s The Humans traps the Blake family in a dilapidated New York apartment for an uneasy Thanksgiving dinner. The play peels back the horror of modern American middle-class life; debt, illness, ageing parents, and unaccomplished dreams.
Trump will likely last a third term at least. But we must keep laughing at him. In this absurd political climate, solar joy offers a reevaluation of the current political paradigm as impermanent. I am championing joy as resistance.
If we're all just putting it on for one another, isn't it nice to think that there is a place where everyone knows it's being put on?
True to the Revue genre, the skits satirised the medical department’s faults. The hypocrisy of allocating exhaustive commutes to hospital residencies was poignant.
Sydney night air, interrupted by a frequency I can only describe as blood rushing through the body.
Law Revue 2025: A Review by Sophie Wishart
The doomers are stilted in that strange tech bro way, unable to understand the implications of even their smallest actions. Their voices and accents clash in soulless conflict.
The production blurred time in fascinating ways. While grounded in Sophocles’ ancient text, it never felt bound by it.
Šime Knežević’s 2025 play Various Characters approaches with care and confusion the condition of Australian multiculturalism. A coming-of-age tale of multiple teenagers living in socially turbulent mid-2000s Sydney, the play never fully realises its focal point, nor answers the many questions it raises before the curtains close.
Maybe we’re just living in a different time. After the concert, I reviewed Alfred’s Boiler Room X AVA set, noticing that the majority of the audience at that event were also white dudes with the same low taper fade haircuts and sunglasses. They bobbed their heads ambivalently and attempted to film the majority of the set, unable to just be in the moment. As events like Boiler Room have become increasingly popular, I sometimes wonder — are people coming to these things to have a boogie and support artists? Or are they going to find the validation that they seek?
He admits to taking inspiration from Haruomi Hosono and Yellow Magic Orchestra. But there are also notes of Anri, Tatsuro Yamashita or Miki Matsubara. His song Giddy Up replicates the feeling of galloping on a horse (naturally) at a staggering 158 BPM.
The Museum of Contemporary Art’s autumn 2025 season celebrates the diversity of Australian Contemporary Art with two exciting new exhibitions: ‘The Intelligence of Painting’, which features the work of fourteen women artists for whom the paint medium is a vital part of their practice, and Warraba Weatherall’s ‘Shadow and Substance’, the first solo show by the Kamilaroi artist. ‘The Intelligence of Painting’ will run until 20 July 2025, while Weatherall’s work can be viewed until 21 September 2025. These two exhibitions are wildly different – just as the contemporary art scene itself is diverse and unpredictable.
SUDS’ Slot 1 performance of Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? was an hour-and-forty-minute absurdist romp that left the audience in both stitches and a state of moral panic. The play, brilliantly directed by Felix Tonkin and produced by Ruby Scott-Wishart, documents the aftermath of a father’s bewildering extramarital affair, and serves as a hilarious allegory of liberal society. It is this element that SUDS’ production claws at so well, unravelling the philosophical thread that weaves its way through the narrative.
Walking past the slightly uncanny midnight pickleball league in a mostly asleep Entertainment Quarter, I wondered if anyone else was aware of the musical significance of what was going to happen inside Liberty Hall. Joy Orbison, the London-born and based DJ and producer, was about to play his first show in Australia. I reached Liberty Hall, pretty set in my conviction that there wasn’t a good chance many pickleball players knew about Joy Orbison. I was pleasantly and incredibly surprised
At the bottom line, salute rejected the pretension that seems to dominate much commercial dance music (read: the uninspired spoken word poetry of Fred Again). Eschewing these pseudo-philosophies of house heavy hitters, at the heart of TRUE MAGIC is a magical world of nostalgia, joy, and most of all, good old fun. Not only a testament to the varied influences upon salute’s signature sound, but the many influences that shape our first encounters with dance music.
Laneway 2025 was a refreshing return to normality for Australian music festivals. It featured a balanced and loveable lineup of fan favourites and internet sensations but was let down by its administration and infrastructure. Its artists provided fantastic and memorable performances that resonated but its vibes were either hamstrung by technical difficulties or over-police and surveillance