Sugar Mountain

Sugar Mountain Festival's effort to meld visual with its aural landscapes paid off this year, with a bevy of impressive installed and projected work.

Thomas Russell's projection installation, You Are Environment, occupies a traffic-filled intersection at the top of the Forum stairs: as people interrupt its circle of light filled with dappled, organic, coloured, over-saturated Rorschach Test-type shapes, their shadows duplicate, mirror, and move off as they do. A sophisticated piece in its awareness of projection as extension and reflection of human experience.

Across the way, Misha Hollenbach's Mezzanine space, swamped with new-tribal beat-appreciators, doesn't really come off, and his small installed creations blend a bit too well with the Forum's already faux-neo-kitsch fixture scheme. In a sideroom, Henry Madin and Hamishi's installation – with dual projectors throwing densely layered politico-pop cultural imagery and text through draped clear perspex and over leafy potted plants to a distorted audio mash – asks you to hold your arms up to 'the sound'. 'The sound' never went away.

The much-anticipated collaboration between Melbourne acid techno trippers Forces and choreographer Antony Hamilton is a massive highlight. The dance troupe animate a 3D jigsaw of big white monoliths, evolving the piece into a party-droid response to Forces' drum machine-heavy aural landscapes and strobey, barcoded, projected visuals. More please.

Kirin J Callinan and Kris Moyes, claiming that insurance issues has prevented them from staging a photosensitivity-induced epileptic fit onstage, put new Callinan songs together with B-side cuts from their Way II War music video. There was a yelling lady in the audience; a shirtless Stereosonic douche; mock-timidity from the duo. With members of interventionalist theatre-makers Black Lung hanging around, and a couple of cheesy lines, it was a touch too staged.

Markus Hofko projects for Woods and ESG. His playful, ironic images of a disintegrating vintage American idyll – jittering streetball games, warping beauty queens – intercast with spiralling sunbeams, jars fittingly with the music. As ESG pick up momentum, repeated grids and washed-out '70s cartoon shapes drive ecstatically with the bass line.

Similar spectres of the pop past made-up Naysayer + Gilsun's mesmerisingly synergic audio-visual experience. Slick and satisfying; like Miramax on acid.

Kit Webster's projections backing Action Bronson and Dirty Projectors create epic abstract environments, dual-projecting onto backdrop and half a dozen triangles hung in a frozen cascade over the stage. The Windows '95-esque graphics flow contrast with each other and develop over the set.

Sugar Mountain's a festival on the rise. They're booking great acts; the vibe is right; and the technology's ace. Though it hasn't reached cohesion or immersion yet, it's on the way.