This ‘hyper-colourful’ landscape is an explosion of colour, sound, energy and playfulness.

From arrival, you are drawn into their Hypercolour Miscellaneous Bistro Buffet, a journey through Slowmango’s new album Hypercolour Miscellaneous, written and performed by a talented set of local Adelaide musicians. Sometimes getting lost in the chaos, their performances were not to be missed, the lead singers’ ability to steer the crowd and scat with ease over the joyful rhythms scoping over a variety of genres was a joy to watch, and the melodic lead on the saxophone was a treat along with the band who brought their own energy to the performance.

The Bait Fridge’s story narrative, alongside Slowmango playing their newly released album, brought a playfulness and chaos to the evening, allowing a feeling of interactive childlike joy for the audience, and allowed a crowd of all ages to be drawn into the performance.

With Slowmangos own album music driving the performance, and incorporating techno and traditional music, to enhance the undercurrent of the Bait Fridge storyline, the crowd was pulled along with the characters of the head chef and sommelier, and an incredibly flustered crustation, varieties of seafood and soup ingredients, flys and cheese panda was also spotted. It was hard to know where, or what to look at in fear of missing out on the hilarity of various creatures.

The creativity and costuming of The Bait Fridge is cheeky and innovative, although seemingly random; the seamlessness of performances shows the group has worked hard to produce such a fun and free-flowing performative piece alongside Slowmangos album creatively.

Having these characters move throughout the crowd changed the narrative of what it is to attend a music gig. This was excellent programming from Illuminate Festival and The Lab, the space was utilised in its entirety. We are so lucky to have such innovative, wonderful, creative collectives here in Adelaide. I cannot wait to see more of this.

I would highly recommend that you follow Bait Fridge and Slowmango to see what they do next, unfortunately, both performances for Illuminate Festival have finished; however, if you head to ACE Open, you can catch ROCKAMORA (featured in the Hypercolour Miscellaneous Bistro Buffet) by Kaspar Schmidt Mumm who is holding an exhibition until August.  

To see The Lab x Illuminate Festival Programming: CLICK HERE

Photo by: emmalinezanelli