Backstage Music | 2025 Season Launch

April 4, 2025, Woodburn Creatives, Redfern

Forget the plush red velvet and the sacred hush, Backstage Music is doing something different. And if their 2025 season launch is anything to go by, “different” is just what Australian new music needs.

At its core, this isn’t just a concert series. It’s a bold manifesto: A Living Space for Living Music. A space that pulses with creative energy, holds space for experimentation and invites all of us – listeners, makers, thinkers – to lean in a little closer and be transformed.

Backstage are known for pushing the boundaries of new music, seeking out new audiences and using unique venues, often hidden, often unconventional and always memorable. Their performances can teeter on the edge of performance art, the kind that makes you sit forward, cock your head and whisper “what just happened?” They’re not just creating concerts, they’re making the kind of music we need if we want to create new art.

And perhaps it’s no coincidence that this boldness arrives at a time when a new renaissance of expression seems to be stirring across the arts. With a dynamic new committee and mentors like Lamorna Nightingale and Damien Barbeler at the helm, there’s little doubt Backstage will ride this wave and help shape it too.

Since 2016, BackStage Music has been an artist-led platform, championing Australian music-based art by showcasing local, early career and established artists who share a passion for the music of our time. Their annual series has consistently provided a living space, equal parts laboratory and launchpad, for diverse collaboration across styles, career stages and sonic traditions.

I’ve been watching this group evolve since their early days in Redfern laneways in 2018 where a seemingly modest warehouse or unmarked space would suddenly crack open to reveal an electric program featuring the likes of Claire Chase, Ensemble Offspring, Bree Van Reyk, Kate Moore and Alice Chance. The performances were unexpected, challenging, thrilling. They stretched my assumptions about what music should be, and I loved the experience.

And now, in 2025, they continue to stretch, to provoke, to inspire.

Season Highlights:

Mirage (June 29): A hallucinatory sonic dreamscape fusing spectral sound with symbolist poetry. Expect Jack Symonds, Jane Sheldon and Blair Harris to push every boundary of perception.

Reflections of Home (July 26): A deeply felt tribute to First Nations connections to land and story – resonant, respectful and rooted in memory.

Entangled Labours (October 10): Music as social commentary. This performance-polemic stares down class, labour and access in the arts. Fierce and necessary.

Unbound (October 31): Featuring Ria Andriani, Melanie Eden and Sonnet Curé, this concert explores identity, artistry and disability through powerful personal expression.

Children of the Resistors (December 6): A joyful, slightly chaotic celebration of early sound tech and future imaginings. Think retro-futurist hootenanny meets sonic playground.

FULL PROGRAM HERE >>

What ties all this together is a fearless commitment to possibility. These aren’t programs designed to please, they’re here to shake things up and to invite us into a world where the unexpected is welcomed with open arms.

So if you’re after safe, well-behaved classical music… you might want to look elsewhere. But if you’re ready to be surprised, challenged and yes, even changed? Backstage is open for 2025 and we can’t wait!