HARD CORE, SOFT CENTRE: BITING DOWN INTO MODERN SOUND
Mouths can make a lot of noises but the scream is the most important. The scream is where music comes from and nowhere was that more evident than last Friday, a cold blue night in Sydney when people pooled into the City Recital Hall for a night of total disinhibition.
The Recital Hall isn’t large. Moving inside, threading our way up the stairs, we pushed at last into a red-lit chasm like a strobing womb, banks of artificial fog rolling over and through us, into our lungs. We arrived just in time to catch the end of the opening act, local Winged Mantis Emerald Dream Machine. Two hooded figures on the decks—ritualists? It was a for-sure occult affair, the slowly rising intoxication of speed and sound. Nobody was dancing yet. Soon they faded offstage, taking with them their summoning tools, leaving hitched breath, anticipation…
Hardcore is primal, hardcore is the human scream; it is the heartbeat that races and makes you sweat, it is the experience of raw oneness, the self-destructive return to a simpler state of matter. Soft Centre’s 2026 lineup for Vivid promised to celebrate the “esoteric edges of the hardcore continuum” in one night bringing together an array of acts, dissolving, in typical fashion for the collective, any lingering trace of the boundary between music, art, and life.
From its beginnings in Casula in 2017, Soft Centre has earned a reputation that precedes them. In fact I had been guaranteed a good time. But it’s still hard to explain just how dazzling, overwhelming, the show was—how immersive. I wondered about the title Soft Centre making my way into the city: it makes me think of sticky candy. The soft centre rewards the bite. All in, moving your body. In becoming the crowd, you give up yourself.
The Violent Magic Orchestra, a four-piece ensemble from Osaka, took the stage next in a sea of light and smoke; faces done up in corpse paint, hard dark figures with zip ties sprouting from their heads like blades. The Orchestra gave us the best visuals of the night. Two-legged brains wandered through apocalyptic vaporwave landscapes, tunnels of skulls, hundreds of open mouths torn from decaying faces. It was black metal of the digital dream, sub-bass turning you inside out and we were literally screaming with joy, this is insane!!
Noise is a way of coming back to ourselves. In this process I am unzipped and totally opened, all my insides becoming my outsides, my mouth opens and I don’t know what comes out, my skin doesn’t really exist, I am porous and passable and when we step outside again for cigarettes it’s like I have been put through the wash.
The usher called us inside, the main act was on stage. I must confess I still don’t know how to hakk, I never learned. My friend jokes that an ancestral spirit rises in her and her body is commanded automatic. It is not me moving, it is the music, it is inside of me. Gabber Eleganza, the event headliner, began in 2011 as an online archival project of Italian deejay Alberto Guerrini. For the last 10 years, Guerrini has been putting on The Hakke Show, a Gesamtkunstwerk fusing dance, music, light, history. The show traces the genealogy of hardcore techno as a DIY, working-class space for gathering, movement, and expression. It takes the immortality of hardcore and throws us back into our own sweaty writhing bodies: HARDCORE WILL NEVER DIE BUT YOU WILL! Splashed behind the silhouettes of raving dancers, bald or wearing braids, intertitles flash across the screen:
HAUNTOLOGY ESCALATION
NO MORE NOSTALGIA
DO YOU LIKE BASS? BOOM BOOM BOOM
Basquiat once said that music is how we decorate time. Through the headrush of a Hardcore Megamix, contorted kickdrums and lightspeed BPMs, these visuals question what time it is we are decorating. We are dancing somewhere between the remembered world (Guerrini is conjuring 90s-era Thunderdome dancefloors) and the immediate now. English theorist Mark Fisher adopted hauntology from Derrida as a way of thinking about music that ‘disinters’ the past: sounds, styles, production techniques forgotten by History. In 2006 on his blog k-punk, Fisher posits hauntological music as music in which surface sounds of recording are centred, rather than repressed: “there is no attempt to smooth away [this] textural discrepancy.” And thus the scream, the clap, thrashing crowd energy colliding: but if Guerrini is disinterring hardcore, escalation looks a lot like necromancy—towards the end of the set, someone (the deejay? A dancer?) was yelling out:
EVERYTHING THAT IS DEAD WILL COME BACK TO LIFE
Resurrecting the dancefloors of the 90s means for Gabber Eleganza resurrecting the spirit of hardcore and its social ethos. This is where the show lets me down. The energy of the City Recital Hall, tucked away in the Merivale exclave—we come tumbling out onto George Street at the end of night with the Ivygoers—does not make a lot of sense for The Hakke Show.
If we are able to disregard where we are in the world, if we are able to lose ourselves in a crowd, then maybe we can forget this sense of disconnect. At the same time I can’t help but feel that Guerrini’s deeper message, his excavation of the hardcore archive as a place for the dispossessed in a time of crisis, falls flat in the face of these barriers. The RADICAL CATHARSIS of OG hardcore came from its egalitarianism, its anti-commercial, anti-establishment message; OG hardcore sprung up at the edges of ‘the system’ in warehouses, factories, under bridges. That message doesn’t land the same when it’s circulating at the corporate heart of the Sydney scene for $79.90.
So while the scream opens up a kind of creative chasm, connecting us across time through the raw energetic prism of noise, it is easy to see how this space can be hijacked, wrung for a profit. I loved Soft Centre, but ultimately what it inspired within me was a hunger for those nights under bridges lit only by iPhone screens—a turn to the local, to the peripheral, to a relocation of that fundamental impulse for sound and for movement to someplace where we might come together freely and as one; one moving body, one enormous mouth.