Sun smooching shoulders, face entangled with bev, ears overstimulated. People on pingas are generally inconsiderate but also often polite. I scooch past a girl, accidentally knocking arm. She looks up, face frozen in half-gurn, eyes like frenzied animal — our genetic lineages bubbling to this moment:

SORRY ABOUT THAT PARDON ME MATE
NO WORRIES YOU'RE ALRIGHT MATE

It's flawless discourse on both our parts. This is the type of decorum on which subcultures form.

Later, I stand struggling to piss alongside six blokes of varying (dos)ages. Our silence is resolute — hasty tags on urinal walls already fading, the occasional cough, grunt, and movement of zipper. At least three people wash their hands. The scene has never been stronger. There is a surprising number of children around; I feel as though they are mostly excited to see Kneecap.

Wet Kiss

Asha

Superficially, it might feel easy to say what Wet Kiss is: Radio Ethiopia Patti, James Chance without the horns, minutely Nina Hagen, very New York Dolls, Steve Harley if you fuck off that dreary English Hobbit-worship. It’s a happening if you’re still Mansonite — big America, Nyooo-Yawk — that one weird instrumental track on the first Fairport Convention album.

I feel like a member of the Source Family when they were still making groovers and before Father Yod made me eat rotten grass tinctures in Guatemala or winged himself off a cliff. Powerful listeners this lot — going to the source material of the source material that others usually suckle off when they wanna be edgy. How delightfully refreshing, the pack of mad cunts. Them T-Rex group vocals, 20th Century Boy, 21st Century Girl — it’s all just a paintbrush improperly washed of its preceding colour.

Backbeats in Sniff ‘n’ The Tears’ “Driver’s Seat,” live art live art live art, a stringa spit at The Riptides — about as close as we get to Australiana. Isn’t music wonderful and isn’t it all too late — fuckin yeah dog, dress it up how you like, we’re all just playing with ourselves until the end-times.

But such comparisons elide what Wet Kiss actually is in the context of Australian music — a terrorist group. Slowly but surely they amass new members, their monetised sarcasm an in-joke to all except the agents shuffling madly after them. There’s a glorious divide right down the middle of the stage between members (bar Andy) who look like they would like to crawl into their own skin, and members who seem to have swallowed the acceptance that they do just have to be here.

There’s very little that activates sense memory among the uniquely chimeric mass of the crowd quite like a good whack of sleaze — a hermaphroditic helioscope beaming back Honey Walk(ing) Away from “gaping holes.” It’s liturgical like a gaudy light-up Mary from the two-dollar shop; it’s Ziggy Stardust’s dream, but one wet with precum.

Osees

Max

People in Victoria enjoy listening to the Osees so much that a band called King Gizzard was formed so that local crowds could listen to the Osees more often. It’s a testament to their rep in Australia that they’re put on at prime time.

As Osees take to the stage, the members mill about and survey the crowd in the same way groundstaff stare and fiddle with a wicket. Adjust the cymbal here, tap on this grass tuft there, cross arms, look discerning. Everyone in Osees is jacked and feels as American as an enterprising handshake or 9/11. The muscles are probably not mandatory but the music is nonetheless physical.

As they set up, the crowd composition immediately shifts: ~800 people who have been aggressively smoking bongs and listening to 1080p garage punk in their shed surge into the fray. Sweaty, cramped bodies just waiting to stomp about. They’ve watched The Dream on YouTube in a hundred differently lit spaces and a hundred different perfectly dialled mixes; this time, they get to actually share in the experience.

Dwyer starts the set by saying “hello festival!” and you already know there’s going to be some fucking about. There’s a motorik quality to the jams, both in the locked-meter and ever-searching nature of Dwyer’s solos – hunched synthwork, ambulance-siren guitar tone, kneeling at the altar of feedback.

There’s a sorcerer-type figure in the background manning a table of electronic devices, and no doubt contributing texture to the cacophony. It’s very hard to look past the synchronicity of two drummers although Asha seems content smashing beers and lightly blowing on the back of people’s necks. I’m standing here stiff nips primarily for Animated Violence because it's one of the heaviest Osees tracks and also one of the only with some bonafide polyrhythmic action.

The exchange is transactional — although it’s money well spent.

Kneecap

Max

I’m standing towards the back of the crowd, happy to be more inquisitive than participatory. The 2CB is deece and I’m in a contemplative mood. Golden Plains and Meredith are some of the only places where I do drugs and actively consider popular music — not so much out of contrarianism but out of a general preference for doing drugs and considering other things.

Where a band like Magdalena Bay meticulously crafts a sort-of aesthetically polished mass hypnosis, Kneecap’s popular appeal feels far more salient. On one hand, there is their political assemblage — use of the Irish language, situatedness in the history of North Ireland’s conflict, righteous stance towards the Palestinian genocide. On the other, a mid-2010s nostalgia for dark web ketamine, throtty drum’n’bass, and the assurance that we can still party-like-theres-no-inflation.

While Kneecap aren’t met with any kickback in Australia, their targeting in UK and US tabloids both reflects and belies a wider solidarity. One can find themselves cynical when balaclavas abound and platitudes thick, but ultimately Kneecap are orientated against the actual-powers-that-shouldn’t-be in the state itself. I like that.

Ela Minus

Asha

Seedy and dark on the edges of Saturday morning, a sound like the fractious little multi-limbed-and-feathered creature that inhabits Fever Ray’s self-titled album getting too far into Lucy Railton. The Colombian native’s visuals provide a welcome break from the sensory onslaught of the past two sets: two stark black screens pacing time passed and time remaining.

It’s Crystal Castles minus the anger — a down-tempo Santigold — and I cannot imagine how well it would have gone down if I had heard this in my teenage fit of angst and prodrome hallucinations. I close my eyes often and let the intricate synthesizer work wear me as a momentary blanket.

A crisp Croatian Amor coolness washes over the whole thing. I pull my scarf tighter around my face and lean back upon the soft hands of the darkness, and while it is still warm I watch the stars blink and churn above.

Sofia Kourtesis

Asha

I very badly need to urinate — a fact I scream at an old workmate as they pass — and as I walk to the bathroom I feel something eject itself violently from my organs. A fell finger-swipe reveals blood, and rather rapidly the sensation takes hold that the scumsucking eggsack on the left side of my body has burst.

I take some horse tranquiliser and end up at the medical tent where a lady takes my blood pressure and waves a thermometer in my general direction before handing me two Coles Panadol. I come out as Underworld chant lagerlagerlagerlager over the speakers and the Panadol aren’t worth a fuck so I take some more horse tranquiliser.

As far as the set goes it’s largely a DJ starter pack of stuff that activates heyday flashbacks for mortgagors, but I’m as smart as a tardigrade right now so fuckin’ works for me brotha yaknowwhatimsayin. I’m getting a lot better at realising that not everything has to be revolutionary to be good.

Max

I lay in my car, morning of second day, calloused nose and sore back to see someone jogging — not in a cool and unravelled psycho-messianic way, but in dry-fit clothing, a moderate pace and relaxed form. It’s the most heinous display I’ll witness over the duration of the festival and petition that person be shot.

Later, you hear “on my neck on my back, on my pussy and my crack” and watch as a 35-year-old civil engineer lets out a loud whooo and grinds on his mate. This is the type of decadence I endorse, although there are no free lunches.

R.M.F.C.

Max

The fan club and their bolstered line-up takes the stage. With the sound of those initial EPs and pubscapes in mind, I'm excited to hear them through the sups’ system. Buz looks like a money launderer or a KGB officer who is in too deep — centre stage, white collared shirt soon to bear a justified sweat. He is the Anderson .Paak of Ulladulla.

The horns in place and mix dialled, RMFC’s songs take on a borderline Hunters & Collectors quality, which is to say they sound more Australian than usual. The mids are lush, vox assuredly despondent, algorithmic angst guaranteed.

Elliot & Vincent

Max

My initial impression of Elliot & Vincent is that I'm uncovering a pocket of pan-European suave club-rock — likely crawling its way out of some trendy corner of Germany or worse yet, France. The steeze is undeniable and it's one of the best twists of the festival when I hear a distinct Kiwi accent from (presumably) Elliot behind the kit.

The two-piece colour sort-of brooding highway rock with noise n poise. There’s not many satisfying reference points that come to mind outside of the leering riffs of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and the groove of MY DISCO sans bass. Two-pieces can quickly collapse into one-trick ponies but E&V never gets lost in the tropes of reviving-the-revival-of-the-revival.

This is a vitality which can only come from not needing to make a band group-chat and having pashed your bandmate.

Adriana

Asha

I go to work momentarily, where it is incredibly clear I am not needed. After watching some dishes and staring at the 5pm kirtan from the Hare Krishna tent, I’m sent on my break an hour and a half in.

This is solid Mediterranean house groove — infectious from head to toe — and the combination of smooth key-based rhythms and visuals that reminisce of iPod commercials slips in behind my ketamine hangover and reminds me of Sunday afternoons when mum would finish the gardening and put on one of the tapes from her hippy raving days.

Adriana is a solid organiser within a portion of the dance scene, and the expert way she navigates a slight line issue speaks to her origins.

PJ Harvey

Asha

The senses tremble a deep auburn colour. There’s a bloke down the front yelling POLLY JEAN real loud, and a couple of women behind me are discussing the intricate machinations that perimenopause wreaks upon the world of female desire. The silence is pestilent.

The rain pops on my sunburnt shoulders like crystals under the tongue. A minute, glowing, avian woman takes the stage. Harvey’s music is at once referential and reverential — teeming in soil rich with literatures clung to in order to suppose an order onto the discordant anarchies of life.

Her vocal delivery teems with a deep world-weariness, according itself with the ground below our feet. She appears as though stepping from a Golden Bough — a being not of flesh but of stone circles and proto-cosmological architecture. She exists not for us but for the leaves above our heads, a singular flare beaming out some arcane knowledge into space.

She closes on To Bring You My Love, and there is rain now suggesting itself into the crowd, and I am awash in the tired aspirations of the skin, praying into the sky before me.