By now, the ritual is familiar. May descends, and with it, the annual VIVID Sydney spectacle.

The Harbour Bridge wears another coat of animated light, the Opera House sails flicker with projections, and crowds jostle for that Instagram-perfect glow. It’s an annual loop—the city’s landmarks bathed in LEDs.

But for those who know where to look, the true magic of VIVID glows elsewhere—quieter, more internal. It’s not on the foreshore, but within the womb-like cocoon of the Joan Sutherland Theatre, where the real luminary experience unfolded on Wednesday night in the form of Californian psych-folk mystic Jessica Pratt.

Returning to Australia for the first time in a decade, Pratt arrived not with spectacle, but with stillness. Her music—haunted, hushed, and hypnotic—doesn’t seek to dazzle in the traditional sense. Rather, it nestles itself into the folds of your nervous system, calming and unsettling in equal measure. It was a set that didn't so much announce itself as it hovered, like mist, somewhere between dream and memory.

The house lights dimmed to red. A shy “Hello… how are you doing?” emerged from the stage. The audience, reverent, settled into silence as Pratt and her band eased into World On A String, the opener from her acclaimed 2024 record Here In The Pitch. A wash of projected rose petals fluttered across the backdrop—an ephemeral vision that perfectly mirrored the music’s light touch. With little fanfare, the spell had begun.

Pratt’s setlist was a curated drift through her shadowy folk landscape, stitched together by her unmistakable voice: a breathy, beguiling instrument that evokes both Joni Mitchell and some forgotten chanteuse on a worn-out ‘45.

Poly Blue glistened, its ethereal lyricism—“He's the undiscovered night, a parting line”—floating across golden light and quiet, measured instrumentation. The sacred transmission was made all the more spectral by the fact that we could never really make out Pratt’s features through all that chromatic fog.

Her band, equally restrained, played with precision and patience. Nico Liebman’s guitar and bass gave texture and weight, while Matthew McDermott’s keys provided delicate flourishes that flitted like fireflies. Diego Herrera’s sax—forward in the mix during Empires Never Know and By Hook Or By Crook—brought warmth and edge in equal measure. Drummer Riley Fleck anchored the ensemble with an abstemious sensitivity, his rhythms at once eccentric and soft-footed, particularly during the skipping beats of Get Your Head Out.

The stage lighting mirrored the music’s palette: eerie greens, amber hues, and amber fogs embalmed the performers in a timeless twilight. Greycedes, with its softly unhinged “la la la” scat, blurred the line between reverie and lounge Muzak, while Opening Night played like an instrumental spell: slow, rain-soaked, ambient. It gave way to As The World Turns, where a baroque rhythmic strum framed Pratt’s voice. Her lyric—“I know this world is tainted, living on the wild times”—landed with more weight than it had on record, the words now freighted by distance and live immediacy.

Between songs, Pratt barely spoke. A sip from a drink. A bashful “thank you very much.” A breath. “1, 2, 3, 4.” But what she lacked in chatter, she made up for in atmosphere. The Joan Sutherland Theatre—its plush acoustics, warm timbre, and encasing intimacy—proved a perfect vessel for her sound. If the Harbour’s light show outside was the city’s neon scream, this room was its inner hush.

Later in the set, Here My Love offered a moment of pure pastoral sweetness, a piano flourish lighting the path like a spring wind chime. This Time Around basked in the burnt-orange glow of faux sunset, while the tempo lifted slightly for Back Baby, where a swell of red matched the song’s dusky romance. Pratt’s performance lives in these micro-moods—songs not performed so much as embodied. She isn’t a performer in the theatrical sense; she’s a conjurer.

The night closed with a benedictine encore. On Your Own Love Again, performed as a duo with Liebman, was a crystalline lullaby of two guitars, soft and intricate. Finally, the band returned for Fare Thee Well, bathed in soft blue and red light, like a secular Hollywood cathedral conversion. Then gone. No grand finale, no bombast—just an honest, passing farewell.

In the ever-expanding sprawl of VIVID’s programming, it’s easy to feel lost among the neon and noise. But nights like these remind us that the festival’s greatest offerings aren’t the ones that blaze across skylines, but those that settle in your chest and hum quietly long after you’ve left the theatre. Jessica Pratt may sing in whispers, but her subtle magic resonates.