Live Review: Moktar @ Carriageworks, Sydney

Passion comes when you least expect it. It spills in from the wintry night air, through the fumbling of ID checks and the patient choreography of drink lines. It hits you not with bombast, but with sincerity and serendipity.

And like all fleeting, unexpected romances, it demands a soundtrack—one that’s complex, unpredictable, intimate. It must shift, mutate, and transcend. A set that moves from the heady intoxication of dancehall to the redemptive pulse of techno. A soundtrack like this is no simple beat drop. It’s an experience. A moment. And that moment arrived with moktar.

At Carriageworks’ Bay 17, under the undulating light show and beneath the heavy rattle of the subwoofers, moktar delivered his signature fusion of pounding club rhythms and traditional Arabic instrumentation with a mix that felt both foreign and familiar. Drawing on his Egyptian-Australian heritage, he moved with effortless precision between high-octane techno and the textures of the Middle East—fragments of oud and vocal sampling rippling like heat mirages over a gritty bass landscape.

Opening with command and intensity, moktar’s set hit early highs: diverse, daring, and downright delicious. At one point, the room seemed to hover, suspended in the sweat and colour of collective movement. Though the set plateaued a little in the final half hour, it never lost its focus. A spirited, almost cinematic light show matched his selections—sharp cuts, warm glows, and shadows that danced like whirling dervishes on the warehouse walls. It was a reminder of what club music can do: bridge worlds, shake assumptions, and, above all, make people move.

Tash LC preceded with an entirely different palette, yet one that felt just as vital. If moktar forged his path through calculated force, Tash LC brought a storm of rhythm and joy. Her set was a bountiful barrage of sounds: polyrhythmic, transcontinental, fierce.

One moment we were in the Caribbean with percussive dancehall, the next we were whiplashed into Afro-house or UK funky, sweating and shouting. For this weary reveller, it was the night’s zenith. These were life-affirming tracks, each one bursting with heat and spirit, igniting something in the cold dark just beyond Bay 17. There was no posturing, no pretence; just an unrelenting, brilliant celebration of sound.

Where Tash LC jolted the body, Wax’o Paradiso drew you inward. The Melbourne collective dropped into deep, meditative bass grooves with an ambient-electronica slant. It was cerebral without being cold, hypnotic without being distant. This was dance music that locked you into a trap of purpose, each track pushing you forward, eyes half-closed, limbs adrift in a momentous swirl of reverb and resonance. It wasn’t peak-hour club chaos; it was closer to a spiritual trek through repetition and resonance. The transitions were thoughtful, deliberate. Less heat, more gravity.

Earlier in the night, Ben Fester once again proved why he’s a mainstay in the Sydney scene. Indefatigable and effortlessly cool behind the decks, he stitched together house, disco, techno and soul with the care and vision of someone who’s lived dance music from the inside. His set was generous and warm, crafted with the finesse of someone who wants you to feel, not just move. His role as a bridge between the diverse acts that followed was understated but essential.

The night’s opener, anusha, offered a gentler but no less compelling invitation into the space. Known both for her shapeshifting club persona and her intimate listening sessions with Sugar Glider Radio, she walked the line between dubby off-kilter textures and heavier bass-inflected moments with confidence.

There was something quietly spellbinding in her selections—tracks that shimmered like frost on metal, strange and soft, but with bite. Dub was the anchor, but there were detours: into femme-fatale glitch, into ambient, into a low-slung kind of dread that made you lean in.

Yes, passion comes when you least expect it. And there was passion in every corner of this lineup: from the gossamer edges of anusha’s set, to the riotous sweatstorm of Tash LC, to moktar’s genre-bending ritualism. It wasn’t just a club night. It was an act of resistance. A refusal to flatten culture, identity or art into the cookie-cutter mold of festival programming.

Notably, this event stood apart from Vivid Sydney’s official program, part of a broader boycott over the festival’s affiliation with Airbnb and its questionable impacts on housing. This boycott wasn’t loud or showy; it was principled. And it’s in these kinds of decisions, as much as the music itself, that the night found deeper resonance.

moktar and friends didn’t just soundtrack a cold night in June. They summoned something else entirely—something bold, borderless, and full of light. A reminder that when you least expect it, passion can still find you.