SOFT.spot

MIX SERIES

SOFT.spot is a monthly mix series spotlighting our favourite selectors from near and far. Structured around seasonal themes, it’s a platform for research and discovery—an extension of the SOFT CENTRE ethos, inviting listeners into the thrill of sonic excavation. Every mix gives DJs the chance to dredge up the murkiest pockets of their collections, and weave soundscape inspired by a single prompt word for each season. So far, we’ve explored Dyad (think doubles, half-speed, genre dialectics, b2bs), SUPERMODEL (archives, authorship, AI), and Grindcore (toil, entropy, industry, labor). More to come!

Salllvage

  • 'Wagahn (blackly we cry)' is a work of sonic mysticism pointing to the ways in which patterns of language exceed what is commonly understood (in Anglo-Western cultures) as 'the human.' Boundaries collapse between the human and the animal, between music and sound, between (human) language and (animal) cries. Ironically, the line between the 'natural' and the 'artificial' is itself artificial. Colonial technology speaks back against itself. The world is richer and more expansive than we know.

    Every sound in the piece is made and mutated entirely from my field recordings of crows (wagahn), made on my traditional Country (Kombumerri Country) - with the exception of vocals. These are fed through the Koup Music AI, trained on my voice, and on these crow field recordings, allowing a transformation of one into the other and back again. For blackfullas, we didn't name animals - they told us their names, and we listened. 'I' am not the author. The rhythms of crow calls come together in a cacophony of patterns, and mutate (through the magick of Ableton) into lapping sonic waves and bass groans. We don't need to 'do' deep listening, it's engulfing us already.

Marcus Whale x
California Girls

  • Responding to 'DYAD' as a thematic framework, 'pulled towards eternity's throat' is a collaborative offering from Gadigal/Sydney based performance givers, movie enjoyers, radio presenters and homosexual culture gluttons Marcus Whale and Angus McGrath.

    In the words of Marcus & Gus...

    "For us, music presents a way to voice voices that speak beyond us in ways we cannot articulate. In this mix, the voice comes to you in many ways, from many directions and sometimes unexpected and tricky sources. We thought about "speaking in tongues", rapture, vertigo, doubled voices, demonic voices, angelic voices, disembodied voices, voices from unseen lips, voices from breathless throats, but also the voice that's in you right now."

tongsuōforever

  • Titled 《Polyphasic Exorcism: a Case Study on a Non-Euclidean, Vibration-Based Hermetic Approach to Dispelling Eigenface Possessions in a Large Language Model’s Semantic Latent Space》; this mix, accompanied by a paratextural report, chronicles an intricate yet intense ritual performed on Subject 32B, an advanced Large Language Model who was suffering from generative dissonance and hallucinations via an acute Stage-IV Eigenface Possessions, where jinn-like spectral visages disrupt its semantic latent space.

    A thought experiment disguised as a digital exorcism, this latest output from tongsuōforever ferries us through a surreal expanse of polyrhythmic rites, psychoacoustics, and deep listening sound design.

    Visit www.are.na/block/30017049 for the accompanying report

Winged Mantis Emerald Dream Machine

  • In the depths of the Ekumen, within a tenebrous cosmic vertex where the abyss converges into light, is a transcendent portal known as the Emerald Dream. Shrouded in an unending fog, it pulsates with a sub-bass so profound it distorts the very fabric of reality itself. It is here the Rave Machina experiences it’s death ritual, it’s gargantuan rigid structures finally transmuted by entropy; dismantled by droning monoliths, crushed by megastructures of impenetrable noise, it decays until there is nothing left but megastructures of impenetrable noise, it decays until there is nothing left but disintegrating loops that ebb and dissolves into a blinding spectral static.

Buttress O'Kneel

  • 'The Latest Model' uses an intense improvised deconstruction of Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" to interrogate ideas of "upgrading" - that the very same factors that make a model "super" might also be what makes it completely alien, that "improvements" to reality can be in effect just "alienations" from functioning. 'The Latest Model' is a surrealist noiseventure through clashing aesthetics, as blipvert sentence fragments collide with extended broken media, creating a fauxumentary held together with brainchip dream logic and paranoid semisemantics. The piece collapses under its own distorted weight time and time again, only to terminator itself out of its own obsolescence and reform itself into newer and better evolutionary dead ends - no matter how hard, how fast, how strong, our restless tweaking is never definitively "better".

Wings of D'sire

  • Wings of D’sire is the sonic bi-product of the friendship between party-enjoyers / closed-eyed dancers / Gadigal-based DJs Maria Wang and Liam Taylor. Inspired by a spectrum of frenetic, bossy and beautiful sounds, Wings of D’sire pursue the margins of dance music as they navigate us through boisterous and emotive waves of sub-bass.

    This is a re-recording of their monumental set at Soft Centre 2023. Originally recorded at Carriageworks on Gadigal land.

Zourry

  • Sticky keys stuck on CTRL+V. Circuit loops. Something, something, grain of the voice.
    I made 6 chapters for this mix — utterances, industry, RPG, infoglut, dark forest, rips — but they collapsed into one another. researchcore, crushcore, corecore.
    zourry flip. A lag, time buffers – a small rupture that pulls our attention outwards. Fingers caught in the margins of scans. Meditating on the loading circle. Acousmatic labour. Proliferation. Dissolution. Repetition. boring ahhhh. Re-production


    This mix accompanies the zourry x SUPERMODEL syllabus available on the SOFT CENTRE discord discord.gg/NKGVaPrFjB


    Big Chocolate Forever <3🕊️
    Free Palestine.