SOFT CENTRE 2025: Sydney’s Four-Day Descent into Sonic, Sensory, and Cerebral Mayhem.

From 28–31 August 2025, Sydney/Eora will shed its polite façade and welcome back SOFT CENTRE, a festival that treats genre boundaries the way a chainsaw treats an ice sculpture - admiringly at first, then with a gleeful disregard for preservation. Now in its eighth edition and expanding into its most ambitious program yet, SOFT CENTRE promises four days, five venues, and six events that will leave your senses rearranged and your preconceptions in tatters.

This year’s program is a cross-city odyssey of cutting-edge sound, new media art, and experimental performance staged everywhere from iconic heritage sites to “don’t-tell-anyone” secret locations. Expect live sets that defy categorisation, installations that make you question your relationship with light and gravity, and performances that may leave you wondering whether you’ve just witnessed art or stumbled into an alternate dimension.

The Body as Battlefield - Stelarc at City of Sydney Creative Studios

Kickstarting the cerebral provocations, legendary performance artist Stelarc leads a workshop interrogating the body as an unstable construct - one that’s being rewired by machine acceleration, sensory augmentation, and cognitive computation. This isn’t your garden-variety life drawing class; here, “alternative anatomical architectures” means hybrid bodies, hyper bodies, and a conceptual poking at the very notion of humanness. Participants will plot and perform a one-minute work exploring physicality, light, sound, and documentation -because if you don’t record your new cyborg form, did it even happen?

The Politics of Listening - Discourse at Artspace, Woolloomooloo

Day two shifts into deep conversation and critical provocation at St Barnabas Church, Broadway. Music journalist Liz Pelly (US) unpacks the cost of the “perfect playlist” in a streaming-saturated world, Andrew Brooks delivers a keynote turning the noise of protest into a politics of listening, and Yuin archivist Madika Penrith launches a 100-track sonic chronicle of Country. Panels explore avant-garde DIY scenes and Southeast Asian creative exchanges, while an experimental film program reframes cinema as a space for resistance and play. Your hosts Levent Can Kaya and Carmen Schieb (aka S.C.U.M) - will keep the intellectual voltage high and the energy delightfully unpredictable.

White Bay Erupts - The Festival’s Flagship Event

Then comes the festival’s volcanic heart: a one-day takeover of White Bay Power Station. Think biomechanical body art from Stelarc, the ecstatic physicality of Young Boy Dancing Group, and Klein’s surreal sonic poetics. New commissions include CONTENT.NET.AU: The Musical (yes, you read that right), and WETAN, a visceral invocation of ancestral memory by Bhenji Ra x Karina Utomo. International debuts come from Pink Siifu’s genre-bending rap experiments and Vietnamese avant-rock mavericks Rắn Cạp Đuôi, alongside shapeshifting club sets from S280F and C Bong Sae. The promise? A “lovely lobotomising day” in the industrial belly of Sydney’s past.

Cinema, Disassembled - Para.Cine at Chauvel Cinema

On festival night three, Chauvel Cinema becomes a portal for live virtual performance. Hearsay, from Naarm’s Eek, Kirby Casilli, and Tina Stefanou, transforms the theatre into a surreal amphitheatre where trust, perception, and memory are playfully dismantled. Meanwhile, NYC’s Team Rolfes returns with The Mustang Speedrun, a chaotic, motion-captured fever dream involving avatar jockeys, failing exoskeletons, and a race to nowhere - because why should cinema stay in its lane?

The Long Goodbye - SOFT CENTRE’s Final Transmission

Closing night dials down the chaos into something stranger: a kind of slow-release sensory aftershock. Aarti Jadu Ensemble weaves mantra, harmonium, clarinet, and bassoon into devotional minimalism. Malibu [FR] turns memory into mist with diaristic ambient compositions, before Ryoji Ikeda [JP] detonates ultratronics - an audiovisual work mapping the computational nature of sound with surgical precision. It’s not so much a farewell as a recalibration, sending you back into the world vibrating at a slightly different frequency.

SOFT CENTRE 2025 isn’t a festival you attend. It’s one you survive - joyfully, bewilderedly, and with just enough sensory reprogramming to make the everyday feel newly alien.

More details and tickets can be found here.

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Words by AW.

Photo courtesy of Soft Centre.