Now or Never returns to Melbourne next week, and the City of Melbourne's winter festival of art, ideas, sound and technology has assembled a program that's equal parts nightclub and neuroscience lab. Here's where to start.
Now or Never takes over Melbourne from 19 to 30 August, and if last year’s program proved the festival could turn a laser show into a citywide event, this year’s lineup is out to prove it can turn a reading room into a mosh pit and a dead composer’s cells into a living instrument.
Here are the shows worth building your calendar around.
Now or Never
- When: 19–30 August 2026
- Where: Various venues across Melbourne
- Tickets here
Stay up to date with what’s happening in and around Melbourne here.
skip-a-beat transmedia takeover
Spryk x Dave Court (Live A/V), Chor Bazaar, Mowgli, Primary Thug, CNTRL V, Neural Natak & More
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- When: Fri 21 Aug, 8pm – 2am
- Where: Max Watt’s
- Tickets here
Presented with skip-a-beat, Mumbai’s pioneering transmedia label pulls into Melbourne for a night that treats the artist talk, the gallery and the dancefloor as one continuous space.
A multi-screen exhibition co-curated with local collective Pseudo runs through the venue all night, turning Max Watt’s into a meeting point for two cities’ worth of South Asian creatives.
The centrepiece is a new audiovisual premiere from Spryk and visual artist Dave Court, built specifically for the floor, with support from Chor Bazaar, Mowgli, Primary Thug and CNTRL V rounding out the bill. Think of it as a direct line into what’s actually happening in Mumbai and Melbourne’s electronic scenes right now, rather than a festival’s idea of it.
Revivification
Guy Ben-Ary, Nathan Thompson, Stuart Hodgetts and Matt Gingold, in collaboration with Alvin Lucier
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- When: Fri 21 Aug – Sat 29 Aug (free artist talk Sat 22 Aug)
- Where: Melbourne Town Hall – Swanston Hall
- Tickets here
This is the one that will make you stop scrolling the program and just stare at the page.
Alvin Lucier, the experimental composer who spent his career redirecting music away from performance and toward the raw physics of sound, died in 2021 at 90. Before he did, he donated his biological material to a team of artists and scientists with a slightly unsettling proposal: keep making work with it.
Revivification turns Lucier’s cells into cerebral organoids capable of producing neural activity, which is then translated into shifting, responsive soundscapes across the Town Hall’s Swanston Hall for the length of the festival.
It sits squarely inside the current arguments about creativity, authorship and generative AI, except the “generative” part here is literally alive. If the concept alone raises questions, the artists are fielding them directly at a free talk the day after opening.
Chuleo Club: A.Chal / Slim Soledad / LIZZ / Dinamarca / Zalina
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- When: Fri 28 Aug, 7:30pm – 2am
- Where: Melbourne Town Hall
- Tickets here
Now or Never hands the Town Hall over to Chuleo Club, the femme-led Latinx collective behind one of Melbourne/Narrm’s most relentless underground nights, and the resulting bill doesn’t let up for six and a half hours.
Neo-perreo collides with house and techno, ballroom energy bleeds into Latin club frequencies, and every set is built to be felt rather than just heard.
Peru/USA’s A.Chal headlines alongside Slim Soledad (Brazil/Berlin), LIZZ (Chile) and Dinamarca (Sweden/Chile), with Colombian-Australian DJ and Chuleo mother Zalina anchoring the room and Kiki House of Furia holding court throughout. Loud, intimate, unrelenting…bring stamina.
MY DISCO / Robin Fox / Jeho Yun + Kyoungjin So
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- When: Sun 30 Aug, 5:30pm – 10pm
- Where: Melbourne Town Hall
- Tickets here
Presented with Arts Korea Lab, this is three separate acts of intensity stacked into one evening, each pushing at a different threshold.
Melbourne’s own MY DISCO make their first hometown appearance in four years, delivering a career-spanning set built on the tension, repetition and negative space that’s defined their sound for two decades; precise, visceral, and about as far from a comfortable Sunday session as it gets.
Robin Fox’s PRESENCE gets its full concert premiere here, lasers slicing through haze in tight sync with sound until the line between what you’re seeing and what you’re hearing stops mattering.
Opening the night, Jeho Yun and Kyoungjin So present the world premiere of 노크 (KNOCK), a ritual of traditional Korean percussion, movement and light that treats the wall in front of you less as a barrier and more as something you can knock through.
Time Remaining – A Now or Never commission
Chunky Move
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- When: Wed 19 Aug – Thu 20 Aug
- Where: Melbourne Town Hall
- Tickets here
A Now or Never commission from Chunky Move Artistic Director Antony Hamilton, Time Remaining puts dancers inside a field of kinetic lasers and light that scan, track and respond to every move they make.
Sometimes the performers follow the patterns; sometimes they push back against them, testing exactly how much the system will let them get away with. It’s less a dance piece with tech accents than an ongoing negotiation between a body and a machine that’s very much paying attention.
Costume and material design nods to archetypal performers of eras past, landing somewhere between familiar and deeply off. Created with technical designers Nick Roux and Nicholas Moloney, it’s mesmerising in the way most good horror is mesmerising.
A Sexual History of the Internet
Mindy Seu
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- When: Tue 25 Aug, 7:30pm – 9pm
- Where: State Library Victoria – La Trobe Reading Room
- Tickets here
Presented with State Library Victoria and The Wheeler Centre, this is a lecture performance with a twist: the audience doesn’t just listen, they speak.
Mindy Seu leads a communal tracing of the internet’s tangled, horny, extractive origin story, with citations read aloud by the room itself via a shared script on everyone’s phones. It’s part history lesson, part collective ritual, and it turns State Library Victoria’s cathedral-like La Trobe Reading Room into something closer to a chorus.
The internet, Seu’s project argues, has never been neutral; and neither, it turns out, is a room full of strangers reading the same lines out loud together.
Gut Health, Essendon Airport, Wrong Way Up, crank
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- When: Fri 21 Aug, 7pm – 11:30pm
- Where: The Curtin
- Tickets here
The Curtin gets the guitar-music night of the festival, and it’s a genuinely strange bill in the best way.
Gut Health return to Now or Never fresh off headline shows overseas, bringing their hypnotic, nightclub-leaning strain of dance-punk and no wave back to a home crowd.
Wrong Way Up counter with vintage Afro disco and psychedelic boogie built on deep grooves and analogue synths, while dreamy new-wave outfit crank arrive on the back of their self-titled debut for Southern Exposure Records.
Holding it all together are Essendon Airport, the wilfully off-kilter Melbourne institution marking nearly five decades of existence, out this year with new album MOR and pedal steel player Graham Lee (Triffids, KLF) in tow. Four very different corners of guitar music, one dancefloor.
Now or Never runs 19–30 August 2026 across venues citywide, with the full program and further tickets available now.
For more information, head here.
Beat is a proud media partner of Now or Never.
