Ben Frost performs at Now or Never 2024
Now or Never kicked off at Melbourne’s Royal Exhibition Building on Thursday 22 August.
Type “Royal Exhibition Building” into Google and the search results will all emphasise the building’s age and historical status. For instance, the Museums Victoria website describes the Carlton monolith as one of the “oldest” exhibition pavilions in the world, and a “true landmark of Melbourne.”
But there’s nothing traditional or old-fashioned about Now or Never – an adventurous audio-visual festival that’s now in its second year.
The program centrepiece is a series of gigs at the UNESCO-listed Royal Exhibition Building, and the opening night event is an exposition of various strands of contemporary experimental electronic music.
Australian-born, Iceland-based composer Ben Frost has brought mathcore guitarist Greg Kubacki along to recreate the crunchy metallic noise featured on his latest album, Scope Neglect. Kubacki shreds on his Gibson Explorer throughout while Frost balances the industrial guitar sounds with electronic ambience and sprinkles of sampled acoustic instrumentation.
The emphasis on strident noise and the lack of drums or melodies could easily have tested one’s patience. But Frost’s performance is ultimately quite spellbinding, particularly as the two 30-foot screens at the back of the stage light up with blues, oranges and yellows that match the sonic intensity.
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Ben Frost at Now or Never
Up next is New York musician Eartheater, whose pop-adjacent originals are a major contrast to the work of Frost and Kubacki.
Eartheater makes dramatic, gothic-tinged pop music that pairs acoustic guitars with electronic production and pulls in bits of emo, hip hop and dance music. It’s definitely left-of-centre – you can’t imagine these songs being played at a high school disco – but compared to the other acts on the lineup, it’s accessible and familiar.
Joined onstage by guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Sammy, the set begins with heavy drum programming and swells of electronic noise before settling into a suite of slow and exaggerated ballads.
Eartheater’s voice is the kernel of appeal, reaching through multiple octaves as the songs recall everyone from Lana Del Rey to the Flaming Lips, cloud rap and Fever Ray.
Eartheater at Now or Never
The crowd thins out before Indonesian techno iconoclasts Gabber Modus Operandi take the stage, suggesting Eartheater was the lineup’s major drawcard. But those who remain are rewarded with the night’s most visceral performance.
GMO’s core duo of Kasimyn and Ican Harem – whose influences extend from hardcore punk and Chicago footwork to Javanese trance-dance and Indonesian folk music – are joined by Singaporean digital artist Brandon Tay. Tay fills the video screens with bright-coloured film montages of domestic life in Indonesia and close-up shots of humans and animals, many of which morph into kaleidoscopic patterns and occasionally become nightmarish.
Musically, it’s all brute-force techno beats and guttural vocal screaming. Deferential? Not in the least. But very much alive.
Gabber Modus Operandi at Now or Never
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