Mode Festival 2024: Sydney still kicking (just)

Photo courtesy: Adriana Vaccari. 

We did it folks: we popped our comfortable bubble of counterculture and went to a large-scale music festival that is distinctly not underground to sus what all the fuss is about. Yes, No Filter’s founders attended the 2024 edition of Mode Festival. As much as we want to promote hectic underground culture, we also recognise that doing so, for most readers, confines us to utter fucking irrelevance. 

When we say large-scale, we mean a few thousand punters. We’re not talking about mega-festivals like Knockout or Lost Paradise. But Mode Festival was a big occasion for us geriatrics at No Filter.

Here’s what we learned.

The kids got style! Dyed hair, dermal piercings and eclectic fashion borrowing from every subculture that has ever existed is pretty much mainstream now. The future of fashion is funky. Rejoice. (Fitzroy eat your heart out.)

That said, we’re talking about a narrow demographic. There were more white kids per square metre than at a Renaissance faire. This was likely a result of high-ticket prices. It certainly wasn’t a cheap day out. For an event with music blaring for 8.5 hours, the entry ticket and ferry cost alone was around $200. Those not wishing to run the gauntlet on entry by smuggling gear past the line of cops and sniffer dogs were faced with the prospect of mid strength spirits and beers for 10 to 15 bucks a pop. I don’t know if it’s just me but the last place I want to enjoy a craft beer is at a music festival. Where was the VB?

In terms of numbers, this was the biggest Mode Festival yet, so the Mode/Bizarro brand must be reaching new audiences. Platforming more diverse forms of music – dub reggae and hip hop, for instance – seems to have helped.

Interest in the boutique festivals is showing no signs of slowing and there is undeniably a ravenous craving in Sydney for dance music events with high-level production value. Australian music festivals that platform crooners strumming on guitars and boppy palatable bands only tired millennials love are stumbling into early graves or branching out to include rave music. For those festivals that have taken up rave music at the last moment, it feels a little disingenuous. It’s more akin to a hospo worker scouring the floor for bags of unknown substances at the end of a club night than an olive branch. Festivals like Mode and Knockout are growing, meanwhile, because they have a trustworthy public image.

Everything at Mode Festival felt a cut above your usual festival offerings: the location, the taco truck slapped, the market stalls with local brands and store representation. The Mode crew know their audience.

Food trucks at Mode Festival 2024. Photo courtesy: Adriana Vaccari. 

If you tired of the music, you could explore an interactive virtual world of neon tower blocks and graffitied walls with a mouse and keyboard. The game felt somewhere between GTA 5 on acid and Enter The Void. Alternatively, you could make yourself comfy in a room with a video log of basement dads discussing depressing and increasingly trippy home living. This unsettling installation by Jon Rafman may have been a comment on the warped reality of modern existence with the rise of AI and deepfakes and the mental health impact (psychosis?) of living out our lives online but I honestly have no clue at all. This is a wild stab in the dark. All I can accurately say is it made for gripping viewing! 

When it came to the music, however, it seems like Mode is shifting away from the DIY warehouse rave feel it garnered in earlier years. This year, it was more Listen Out than Soft Centre. RIP.

On the one hand, Mode is a welcome breeze of change from festival line ups that rinse the same white faces over and over. There’s a sincere attempt to platform diversity and it honestly makes a difference seeing women and thems on stage rocking out.

Aforementioned interactive art installation. Photo courtesy: Adriana Vaccari. 

There is promise in the music curation. Like previous years, the Void stage had squelchy techno and breakbeat. This is the location for club beats with futuristic sci fi burbles sprinkled over the top, curiously hypnotic yet unpredictable at the same time. Nightclub meets doof. Rhyw was a highlight.

The energy ramped up as darkness arrived. The cavernous Turbine Hall at night was a sight to behold: lasers swirled like vine-encumbered trees in twilight groves, making neon clouds out of wisps of vape smoke. The sheer volume and crispness of the immense sound system hanging from the rafters – what I’d term a sonic cannon – was hypnotising. I’m no sound connoisseur but I can say that listening to that rig was a world away from watching a mate shove their Youtube-to-MP3-converter-rip through a pair of rinsed PAs and an 18 inch sub at a rave under a bridge in suburbia. I’ve rarely heard anything like it.

But overall the music was certainly poppier than the last (and only) time I went to Mode (2022). The artists themselves may have been a diverse bunch but the music wasn’t. The more established artists who the Bizzaro crew behind Mode booked tended to be safe bookings, people who probably peaked, well, a few years ago.

Many music critics have recently argued that tracks have shortened and quickened amid a remix race to the bottom, dance music included. Gen Zs, brought up on a diet of TikTok and hyperpop, have found comfort in lightning speed music and manic creative experimentation. With music that felt quite slow, chill even, the Mode line up felt like a blast from the past, which either means they’re ahead of the curve or pandering to an audience that may be aging out of raves. With countless Australian festivals disappearing due to a lack of financial sustainability, the need to keep the festival afloat has probably played a part in Mode Festival moving towards more traditional mainstream sounds.

Cockatoo Island, a former penal establishment where convicts were sent for secondary punishment and former shipyard, now heritage listed, feels like the perfect rave location. Most musicians, critics and scholars pinpoint the post-industrial landscape of Detroit — with its derelict warehouses, rusted automobile skeletons, rotting wood and mosaics of cracked glass — as the birthplace of techno. From the late 80s, techno became the sound of the city’s disenfranchised Black working and middle classes. This DIY ethos amid societal and economic collapse in Detroit became a form of self-empowerment. Then, when the Berlin Wall fell down, techno became the anthem to reunification, finding a home in urban ruins. So I spent the day waiting for something harder and grittier, something a little more ravey.

It’s mostly a matter of personal taste, nothing more. I’m conscious that I’m a hard man to please when it comes to dance music.                                                            

But it seems the behind-the-scenes difficulties of hosting any cultural event in Sydney may be taking a toll. Endless red tape, insane policing fees and chronic underfunding for the arts is forcing festival organisers to offer more sanitised products.

As a Sydneysider, I’m tired of writing that Sydney is still alive. I’m tired of celebrating events simply because they went ahead and actually happened. That’s the kind of bar we have in Sydney. This isn’t a shot at Mode Festival at all. It’s a recognition that this shit is wearing thin really quickly.

It’s a miracle the festival wasn’t canned. Dedication and perseverance has won out in the perennial NSW tug-of-war between nanny state governance and the arts. But how sustainable is this model? Sure, the NSW government has recently introduced new legislation to provide financial support for the state’s festival industry but the new rules really only promise to bail out mega-festivals – those shit boring normie fests with Spotify-core background music and indie bands comprised of long-haired white dudes in drab button-up shirts. As much as Mode Festival isn’t my jam, I sure hell believe it’s more worthy of government backing than Splendour in the Grass and Live Nation Australia, aka the Devil, which runs Splendour.

Live Nation has hogged tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer-funded government grants in Australia, many for cancelled events during the COVID-19 pandemic, while simultaneously turning over ungodly profits. In 2023, the revenue of the entertainment behemouth rose by 36%. It recorded a net profit near to 1 billion Australians dollars. Yes, billion. Its largest shareholder is an investment fund linked to the Saudi Arabian royal family.

In the US, industry insiders have accused Live Nation Entertainment, the parent company of Live Nation Australia, of sneakily obtaining COVID relief funds. Moreover, there is now confirmed evidence for the whirlwind of rumours that Live Nation places gig tickets directly on resale website to maximise profits. It’s a practice called ticket scalping or ticket touting. You might have heard of it. It’s often associated with scam artists, automated bots, organised crime groups and the flare-waving hardcore ultras of European and South American football teams.

A range of people working in Australia’s festival industry believe Live Nation Australia is also engaging in grubby, monopolistic behaviour. Four Corners is about to air an investigation into the matter, so expect this to be the talk of the town very soon. 

This is who our fine nation’s governments believe is worthy of financial support. Not Mode Festival. Not small and mid-sized festival operators, struggling to create any profit whatsoever. No. Live Nation.

God help us.

Photo courtesy: Adriana Vaccari.