Backstage Music 2025 Season: Dive into the Future of Australian Music!
2025 Season Text. People gathered talking in front of a large glass box.
Backstage Music is thrilled to unveil its 2025 season, a bold exploration of Australian music-based art, set to ignite imaginations and spark conversations. We're building "A Living Space for Living Music," a dynamic hub where creativity explodes, communities connect, and artists thrive.
"The magic of a Backstage gig is that it's a party, but one where you walk away buzzing with new ideas and musical sounds"
2025 SEASON
A charcoal inspired graphic including finger prints, leaves, a harpist and people marching. Includes text detail about the gig (included in the text below)
Prompt + 1 Charcoal
Saturday 14 June 6pm
A YOUTH EVENT curated by Imogen Hamer and Aidan Eccleshall
YOU + 1 = Experimental Art! Aidan Eccleshall and Imogen Plunkett-Hamer are providing the charcoal-inspired prompt ingredients - text fragments, objects, light, sound - you bring the creative spark. Shape unmade artworks in a collaborative experiment with tone, texture, and symbolism. BYO Acoustic instruments and other artistic mediums. Bring a creative friend (+1) to share new directions. Materials, tea, and mulled wine provided.
A dark moody image of a woman (Jane Sheldon) in various shots looking in different directions. The images are blurred and smeared giving the image a ghostly, dreamy quality.
Mirage
Sunday 29 June 4:00 pm The CHURCH
Curated by Jack Symonds
Prepare to be drawn into "Mirage," a hallucinatory experience where the natural world's desecration unfolds through spectral sound and symbolist verse. Performers Jack Symonds, Jane Sheldon and Blair Harris present music by Saariaho, Faure, Dusapin, Sheldon and Symonds. Their spectral sounds creating a mesmerizing, dreamlike experience, a shimmering, unsettling illusion.
All tickets to Mirage at The Church are complimentary. Please reserve your tickets in advance to avoid missing out as capacity is limited.
The image is focused on a smoking bundle of still green foliage bound together at the branch, representing an Indigenous Australian smoking ceremony and a pair of black shoes out of focus in the background overlooking.
Reflections of Home
26 July 7.30 PM Woodburn Creatives
Curated by Laura Case and Lamorna Nightingale
Echoes of ancient landscapes, resonate with the spirit of the land that has witnessed millennia. "Reflections from Home" is a testament to the enduring connection between First Nations people and the landscapes that have shaped their stories. Experience a night woven with threads of land, memory, and resilience, in an artistic tapestry that invites you to delve into the depths of First Nations' connections with home and heritage through the transformative power of the arts.
An aged black and white photo, likely from an old newspaper, showing a group of twenty industrial workers dressed in jumpsuits and construction hard hats while playing an assortment of brass instruments including Tubas, Trumpets, Trombones, Baritones, Euphoniums and Tenor Horns outside of a factory.
Entangled Labours
10 October 7.30 PM Woodburn Creatives
Curated by James Hazel and Lamorna Nightingale
Who gets to make art in Australia, and on what terms? Entangled Labours looks at the rich lives and experiences of working-class people in so-called Sydney. Including the premiere of a new film by the Class Actions Collective about the selling off of social housing in Redfern; a drag performance set in Mount Druitt; hip-hop spoken word; a performance with a brass band; and a ‘laboured’ action using amplified shovels. By showing the unique ways working-class people create, Entangled Labours asks us to think about the systems that decide who gets to make art, and the poetry that takes place in-between.
A woman under turquoise lighting holds a microphone with mouth agape and furrowed brow, singing with great conviction and in the company of a second woman by her shoulder in the background.
Unbound
31 Oct 7.30 PM East Sydney Community and Arts Centre
Curated by Ria Andriani and Lamorna Nightingale
"Unbound" defies artistic boundaries, presenting a night of profound personal expression. Witness Ria Andriani's soul-stirring vocals performing Molly Joyce's compositions, followed by Melanie Eden's experimental fusion of vocals and accordion, where spiritual depth meets powerful social advocacy. Sonnet Curé, drawing from their "Headliners" experience, unveils a new experimental work, channeling their lived experience of deafness. Together, these artists offer an evening of transformative art, pushing beyond expectations.
A hand-drawn cartoon image centered around an overalls-clad young character, reminiscent of a newspaper hawker, is shouting with gusto. They are surrounded by what appears to be sound waves, electric impulses and an electric cable plug.
Children of the Resistors
Sat 6th December, 3:00PM MACHINE HALL or WOODBURN
Curated by Alexis Weaver and Damian Barbeler
Backstage Music's retro-futurist hootenanny celebrating the early sound technologies that bleeped and blooped their way into our hearts and imaginations. Curators Damian Barbeler and Alexis Weaver bring us pioneering classics and brand-new works inspired by the optimism and wide-eyed spirit of the early adopters of these beautiful, temperamental machines. Featuring sonic speculations by Hirofumi Uchino, Jocelyn Ho and Niamh McCool, with more to be announced.