Crowned ‘Music Event of the Year’ at the FBI Radio SMAC Awards in 2017 and 2018, SOFT CENTRE is back for its newest installation across Carriageworks on June 4th. A frontier of new sound, art, and digital media, SOFT CENTRE is the pulse of radical experimentalism, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and the future of art.

This year, expect to see a smorgasbord of international and local talent — spanning live AV performance, light installation, and large-scale ambient compositions that defy genre and distort worlds. It was a herculean effort to select only a handful. Underneath are the three acts I’ve cherry picked that offer a little preview to the sheer magnitude of what’s to come.

The first whiff of Plea Unit I committed to memory was the SOFT CENTRE poster, designed by Endless Prowl. The colour schematics are almost lilting; lavender and dusky pinks of a faraway sunset are dispelled by the opaque, sword wielding figure who seems to summon fractal shards that slash through the sharpened landscape from top to finish.

It almost opens like a tableau; the elemental pieces are structured in delicate arrangement, while others are protrusions, sharp enough to impale by the dozen. Fantasy, hyper reality, and the pockets of pop culture that conjoin both, are all on a knife’s edge.

So, how the hell does one go about replicating this on stage? Teether, Bayang and Sevy had the answers for me.

Bayang: “Nutjobs screaming on stage and some really cutting edge 3D art.”

Prowl: “ADHD”

At inception, Plea Unit was assembled as a pre-covid one-off. The collaboration, spanning Prowl, Teether, Bayang and Sevy was reconceived during the height of the fabled Naarm lockdowns, and thus became an on-going dalliance between the creators through dimensions of live performance and 3D modelling.

Plea Unit : “I think it'd be unfair if I didn't mention we all came from the peripheries of punk and metal. I feel because of that, we all share a willingness to be steeped in the mystic, the critical, the odd, the strange and straight up dorky. We're bound together by a shared mission of fucking round with the formula and tweaking the algorithm of a system we feel ourselves in enmity with, or at the very least incompatible. We're just nerds really, quiet at our own lunch table with access to too much recording gear.”

Punk, metal, and what Bayang, also known as Harry, credits to the slog of pandemic fuelled malaise was what initially had led to a breakthrough, or at least the need for one.

Bayang: “I would get there, see the city empty and dead from 35 storeys up, then go home and do nothing but smash cigarettes and try and get in some push ups everyday. I don't know how other artists went in that context, but that environment combined with some personal upheavals happening at the time did NOT constitute a great creative atmosphere for me - every line was an enormous effort, but it felt important to keep the gears turning somewhat.”

It was through this cycle of pushback and tedium that the group had somehow continued to evolve, and began its shift into curating a space that felt right for each member. They found a gateway through art in order to sketch out alternative worlds to the ones we’re confined to. The group have grown accustomed to framing it as a liminal limbo — “we journey there and bring artefacts back from it, kind of like ‘Roadside Picnic’.”

When asked for insight into his world building, Prowl has it down to a science. He takes Unreal Engine 5 to construct landscapes shrouded around statues and figures sculpted in VR, before recontextualising them in naturalist backdrops. This live performance will feature a cavernous, underwater scene. Then character mobility and material function is factored in, to build what Prowl labels the “boundless context of an imagined world”, also introduced by him as “DR4X”. The imagery links the reactive, immediate and ephemeral by fusing in the live audio performance from the rest of the team.

Prowl: “As it progresses, this fictional narrative allows me to contemplate existential and ethical debates of our society within the context of “DR4X” by interlinking the narrative with my own ideas on Panpsychism and metaphysical concepts.”

Subterranean dungeon rap. Motion capture. Bunker bars. Hip-hop from the bomb shelter and the storm drains. Rap concrete. VR Sculpture. Glacial post-Haraway worlds. Odyssey into the realm of DR4X, only at Soft Centre. See you there.