I didn’t mean to sound religious about sub-bass. But here we are. Soft Centre Review.

Source: White Bay Power Station

We stepped off the bus at an industrial corner of Sydney I rarely visit. I could already feel the bass from 300 metres away. Sydney night air, interrupted by a frequency I can only describe as blood rushing through the body.

White Bay Power Station. Sharp contours and industrial afterlife. The warehouse looked bigger in person, full of mist and red light, like someone had poured every rave from the last forty years into a single, humming structure, leaving the windows open.

Haze. Screams. Lights. Bass. 

It pumped up through the floorboards, threading strangers together in a communion that felt more like ritual than party. “What alternative dimension did we just enter?” I remember my friend asking. I felt, for the first time in months, like a kid lost in a mall, yet at peace with the thought of never being found.

People say “the crowd looked like a magazine fashion shoot” at every festival, but here it was ridiculous. I kept waiting for someone to ask for my dissertation on Berlin post-techno, or to offer me a designer cigarette. So this is where they’ve been, I thought. After climbing a staircase with red illuminations and mist curling at our ankles, I found projections, pulsing text, dancers weaving on a huge industrial X, warped text that read “Ecstatic Utopian Fantasy” and reality like the climax of a particularly well-funded hallucination.

I enjoyed Soft Centre so much that it was difficult to write this review without enthusiastically fangirling the entire time. It felt as though an infinite amount of atriums stretched out before me as I walked through more mist, shadows, and stairs. The organisers of Soft Centre were not joking when they said they’d make you feel small and out of control.

I treated myself to a pit stop at North Turbine: a smaller stage and dense crowd. S280f was playing a rhythmically rich beat that landed somewhere between restraint and rupture. The set felt emotionally contained but physically unhinged. On the dance floor, I lost myself — no individuals, no self-consciousness, just one hypnotic tide. Dancers at the front, emos in the back (my favorite crowd). Hypnotised by the stage, dancing like Dionysus’s drunk Bacchantes. It felt intimate. Alive.

Then we hit the South Turbine. Pink Siifu played. There was rage, and presence. Limbs collided on the dance floor, as though headless bodies were moving with the beat. Growing up in Turkiye and then moving to Australia, I hadn’t yet found a filthy, lively mosh in Sydney yet. Finally, I found myself amongst people carelessly dancing to their hearts’ content. No one in this city was having more fun that Saturday.

Soft Centre was full of unexpected surprises. When we stepped out for a dart break, we saw a group of dancers dressed in white that may as well have crawled out of someone’s Saharan dream journal. The Young Boy Dancing Group built a living bridge of bodies, and swung their wet hair around, splashing water like fireworks. 

I witnessed 404.zero’s Black Sunday, whose whole approach is about pushing viewers to come “face-to-face with their own turbulences”. A generative sound that makes the walls and your thoughts flex, shifting between a feeling of spatial collapse and total freedom. It’s not music, exactly; more like a neurological reboot. I stayed for—I don’t know how long.

Then came CONTENT.NET.AU— pure mayhem in my favorite way. Was it a DJ set? A play? A satire? They merged comedy with club anthems. Warehouse managers storming in, dancers breaking character, someone getting fake-fired mid-drop. Chaotic yet precise, funny and theatrical, the energy was so specific and self-aware.

"Fuck a big label when we have a space where we can be ourselves."

"You guys are everything to me." 

For the last set of the night, I danced to Queen Asher and Reheme Tajiri. The crowd was summoned by the sound. Tajiri followed the crowd’s vibe, riffing off the joy produced by her music. The audience moved as one.Tajiri’s reputation for syncopated energy and precise crowd-reading is entirely justified. 

The whole festival felt like ecstasy traveling my veins, pumping adrenaline non-stop.

In a city that I had felt disconnected in since I’d moved here, I was plugged back in. On our way out, we chatted to a group standing outside. We talked fast: recapping, ranting, repeating the word insane. It was fabulous.

Soft Centre has earned its place on the national stage, knitting a community together through music, art, and spirit. The organisers clearly were not interested in safe bets, major labels, or sanitised “art experiences”. They deliberately collided with experimental sound, new media art, club culture, installation, and critical discourse. Sydney was transformed into a living, breathing ecosystem that breeds subculture and genuine artistic risk. 

Thank you, Soft Centre. Gerçekten. Until next time.