Since its inception in 2017, their annual SOFT CENTRE festival in Sydney has forged a left-hand path through the tangled intersections of experimental sound, digital media, and performance art, building immersive experiences as disorienting as they are revelatory. With a reputation for championing fringe subcultures and outsider art, their ethos is rooted in staunch experimentation and cross-disciplinary collaboration, dismantling conventional artistic modes to platform future-facing creators. SOFT CENTRE have co-curated a number of projects at CTM 2025, showcasing leading voices from the burgeoning Australian underground.
On RSO.Berlin’s main floor, Karina Utomo (RINUWAT, Kilat) will bring blackened vocals drawing from extreme metal, Javanese mythology, and the outer edges of human vocal expression, weaves together themes of tradition and defiance. She’s joined by Joshua Wells (A Colourful Storm, Downwards) purveyor of extreme rhythmic programming traversing drum and bass, noise, electro and dark ambient, and R. Rebeiro (HTRK, My Disco), who subverts traditional percussive modes such as Japanese gagaku and Indian Tabla, to coax rhythms that flicker between precise pointillism and metallic thunderclaps.
RSO’s second floor will become a dedicated SOFT CENTRE x CTM event with late-night oriented live and DJ sets.
Female Wizard’s cross-genre DJ set will baffle the binary, delaying gratification and embracing dissonance to transform hedonism into an act of defiance. Blended tempos with visceral intensity mirror her fascination with the fragility and power of breath, a recurring motif in both her music and performance art.
On-the-rise rapper, producer and performance artist SOLSA, will join forces with SoundClown and SOFT CENTRE co-director Thick Owens to unveil an itinerant new live set. Expect deft and irreverent lyrics, unhinged stage theatrics and razor-sharp production, mashing gnarled strains of gutter rap, freetekno, industrial and bush doof-inspired squelch.
As a solo electronic musician R. Rebeiro explores probability as an artistic methodology to enact rhythmic expression. Combining analogue grit and digital precision by the use of manipulated drum machines and Max/MSP, R. Rebeiro’s set will unleash lazer sharp generative rhythms to explore ideas around cause and effect, variation, acceptance, and deep listening.
Under the moniker NERVE, sonic architect Joshua Wells forges tracks that feel like precision-tooled machinery breaking free of its programming, fusing elements of drum & bass, jungle, industrial, electro, and noise into dense, kinetic compositions that pulse with both mechanical intensity and organic chaos.
Closing the floor, Argentinian DJ and producer Tayhana’s sets are a collision of raw energy and fearless experimentation, weaving together the frenzied rhythms, frenetic BPMs, and kaleidoscopic textures, drawing from contemporary and traditional Latin American music.
Taking place on another evening at Radialsystem, the previously announced live film experiment »STACK« explores power dynamics and cultural peculiarities arising from posthumanism, bio-capitalism, and ecological horror to redefine sci-fi horror and smut through dematerialisation of human matter, bringing together artists Harrison Hall, Henry Lai-Pyne (Eek), Sam Mcgilp, and Alexander Powers (Female Wizard).
After the festival we’ll be announcing more collaborative programming which will see CTM visit SOFT CENTRE in August 2025.
Eek, Female Wizard, Harrison Hall, Sam Mcgilp pres. STACK has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.
This project has been assisted by the Australian Live Music Business Council.