Melbourne’s New Arts Festival Opens with a Free Party by Soju Gang

Melbourne has been full of events this year. We’d barely had time to recover from festival season before it was the Melbourne Food and Wine shindig, then RISING, then MIFF, and that’s among the throngs of hot and sexy events already part of the city’s usual repertoire. They have to keep us busy in the bitter wintertime… a party a day keeps the SADS at bay.

Now look: another culture, arts and music festival has reared its head. promises two weeks of art, ideas, tech and music. This week, the City of Melbourne has rolled Melbourne Music Week and Melbourne Knowledge Week into one evolved 17-day party in August, held across Melbourne’s most iconic venues.

Headlining the [free] opening party is , i. e. Sky Thomas – Melbourne party scene mainstay and multi-hyphenate creative.

Known for her fun sets, fashion label, modelling and staunch activism, the Gunai/Kurnai, Yorta Yorta and Wiradjuri woman has been given the keys of curation to the festival’s kick-off. Speaking with VICE Australia, Sky said the lineup was “just a bit of fun, honestly”. “I will admit, the City of Melbourne thought it would be cool to have, like, some First Nations artists… I decided to put all First Nations artists,” she said.

’ “Not just all Aboriginal and Torres Strait, we have some international First Nations represented as well. ” For Sky, the opening party would ideally be “just a space to have fun”. “I think when we come up with these big festivals, or these big curations, sometimes people just want to send out a very specific message, and touch on these tones and genres and ideas… I think sometimes we just lose being able to be grateful and privileged that we live in the time that we do now.

And we do, and should, have the time made for us to just enjoy ourselves, and exist. ” Curating the lineup with this in mind, Sky has brought together a hot lineup, featuring DJ PGZ, sovblkpssy, and Mookito. “Over the last couple of years, I’ve been getting a lot of curation work, really enjoying it.

And most of the time it’s just come out of wanting to give people that I really love an opportunity to do something. And for it to snowball into sort of like a mini side career has been awesome. ” Sky said she was looking forward to sharing the stage of her curation, especially with DJ PGZ, fresh off the back of a Europe tour.

“I’ve seen his career kind of grow from the beginning, and seen how not only he’s grown more and more into exactly the kind of artist that he wants to be, but seen how the interactions that he has with other artists, and the places that he goes to influences his work,” Sky said. “He’s just been touring Europe too. So I’m gonna be excited to see what he brings back with him and all the things that he’s picked up on his travels.

” Sky herself will MC and perform – you can expect an energetic set spanning any genre she feels is right. Her speciality is uptempo explorations of dance music, somehow revelatory while staying attuned to the audience’s unique desires. Sky said her music obsession has been Jersey club music, even before she started DJing.

The genre is currently having a moment, with Drake, Ice Spice and Lil Uzi Vert jumping on the thrumming, aggressive basslines. “I’ve been upset about it!” she said. “I’ve recently been playing remixes into my sets and people have been loving it.

And I’m like, Because I’ve had these songs for like, 10 years. ” “Just enjoy the music for what it is. Don’t just jump into it because Lil Uzi did a fun little track on it,” she laughed.

“No, it’s really exciting now to move into a music spectrum where people are more open to stuff. I grew up going to the clubs and all the events, and you had to go to very specific places to listen to specific things. Whereas now, like, I work at a hip hop, R&B Club, as an example of one of my little side fun things.

And that used to be exclusively hip hop, R&B, rap. Now, if you can fit it into the vibe, and the people are jumping on it, you can mix DNB, you can mix ballet, Afro, amapiano… you can mix in so many different sorts of genres, just making sure that you’re curating it well. ” This openness to a variety of influences, genres and inspirations resonates with what Sky had always striven for – the pursuit of a good time for everyone, as opposed to identifying herself within one genre.

“I’ve always kind of self identified as more of a ‘party mix’. I’ve never really sat in a very specific genre. I want to be able to cater to people, I want to be able to try to pick up a vibe so everybody in this space can feel like something was played for them, or something that they could enjoy.

“I want to not only play the things that I like, but I want to make people feel like they can be a part of my set as well and have a good time. ” For Sky, kicking off the festival with an all-First Nations lineup simply made sense. “We call this ‘Now or Never’, but I’m a big believer in understanding where we’ve come from, for us to move forward.

And I think considering the sort of themes ‘Now or Never’ really holds, I do think now or never this is a time where we fully acknowledge and celebrate and understand, not just Aboriginal history and culture, but the history of this land, and how to move forward for it to be better. ”.