Soft Centre: Gabber Eleganza, Violent Magic Orchestra

Since 2017, SOFT CENTRE has championed the fringes of electronic music, sound art, contemporary dance, performance art, light works and new media art.

An ultimate extreme supreme visual art music project in which techno, black metal, industrial, and noise are harmoniously integrated. VMO is a juggernaut exercise in stomach-turning sub bass assaults, pneumatic blast beats and violent black metal barrages. Like black metal meets Kraftwerk or Blackened Aphex Twin. Currently the unit that consumes the greatest quantities of electricity at live houses and clubs — the total power consumption of VMO is 5000W (equivalent to 56 amplifiers).

In 2017, Alberto Guerrini created Gabber Eleganza as a digital archive to document his love of the gabber subculture. A youth movement that originated in the Netherlands in the early 90s before reaching the mainstream, gabber combined intense, high-bpm hardcore music with a unique aesthetic that drew from punk, futurism, and street style. Now a multidisciplinary platform encompassing art, fashion, and music, Gabber Eleganza (and the associated Never Sleep label) is where Guerrini joins the dots — both sonically and aesthetically — between hardcore, post-rave movements, and contemporary culture. 'The Hakke Show' is his defining artistic statement: a gabber set featuring a group of hakke dancers who bring the classic high energy gabber dance style to life on stage. It combines the immediacy and physical intensity of a rave with the structure and dramaturgy of a live dance piece.

These hardbass fiends have been bringing squat and free shots to the dance floor since 2019. After touring England playing festivals: Boomtown, Bang Face and Balter - fareevader have just turned Sydney and Melbourne on their heads by bringing the SLAV RAVE back to Australia with their event HARDBASS ADIBASS. You might expect an everyday dj set and you would be totally wrong — fareevader bring interactive chaos, non-stop rave and costume quick changes that would put a magician to shame. fareeavder shocks event the people that have been warned.

WMEDM is the collaborative project of friends and artists Obelisk and Index, who together play frenetic, high impact experimental music. Individually, Obelisk is a producer making heavy experimental electronic music with an edge of emotional grandeur, and Index is a DJ and curator at Soft Centre, whose sets oscillate between high-intensity rave music & sonic niches that she has sourced from the depths of the internet. Index and Obelisk are late night presenters whose shows are back 2 back every Thursday on FBi Radio - post-genre ‘internet music’ show Deep Web and noise and experimental show Mithril respectively.