Live Review: Dark Mofo: Winter Feast, Yamantaka Eye, My Disco, Blacklist

The second Friday of Dark Mofo heralded one of the biggest nights of the festival, with tickets sold out for three of the biggest events: the Winter Feast, Eye: CIRCOM, and Blacklist.  

The weather conditions proved perfect for the Winter Feast and thousands of people swarmed to the Hobart waterfront to eat, drink and be merry. Groups of people gathered around the numerous fires outside to watch guest chef Sean Moran roast whole chickens over giant grills. Inside the red-lit PW1, hundreds of people sat along four long tables, their tops peppered with tea-light candles. From the ceiling hung crayfish pots filled with fairy lights, and performance artists clad in furs wandered amongst the crowds. Over 100 stallholders worked at the Feast, providing the best of Tasmanian produce, with notable standouts including Matthew Evans’ pork buns, and half lobsters cooked with whiskey. On the drinks front, the big four Tasmanian whiskey producers were present (Overeem, Lark, Belgrove and Sullivans Cove), along with local gin smiths and Tasmanian vignerons. Children and adults made up the crowd, and on the cold Tasmanian winter night, the organisers of Dark Mofo provided the perfect opportunity through which the festival-goers could pursue pleasure. 

Running concurrently was an electronica and Japanoise event, at The Odeon Theatre. Presented by MONA in partnership with the Red Bull Music Academy, the sold out event promised a Phil Spector-esque “sonic wall of sound”. While the enraptured onlookers watched, Boredoms frontman Yamantaka Eye stood in the middle of a circle formed by eight seated musicians, controlling Apple Mac computers. The musicians created noise-rock, Eye ordering, through gesture, rises and falls in the digital music. At times, Eye sang along with the music, but mostly stood in silence, the artist a veteran performer. The reception from the crowd was mixed, with a number of viewers seemingly unimpressed with the music, but overall the reception was positive. Eye was followed by My Disco, a Melbourne rock band who provided more ‘conventional’ music, though for the audience it was an exploratory journey. They got the crowd moving, with a combination of post-punk, dance music and indie-rock. 

At the conclusion of the event, a number of people made the pilgrimage to the fourth, penultimate, night of Blacklist.

The tickets to the Friday event of Blacklist having long since sold out, people queuing for tickets at the door faced a wait of around an hour (an almost unheard-of occurrence in Hobart, where the upper range of waiting to get in to a club is ten minutes). The music on the evening was a combination of R&B/soul music (featuring Marvin Gaye’s Ain’t No Mountain High Enough), alternating with futuristic EDM as performance artists took to the stage, painted themselves white and danced wildly. While a number of the standout events were the same as had happened at the other Blacklist evenings (to the mild disappointment of the crowd), the night was wildly successful, with many seizing the opportunity to dance on until dawn.