Dylan Alcott’s Ability Fest returns on Saturday 11 April with a dance music-focused lineup.
This year’s event, taking place at The Timber Yard, will feature DJ sets from PNAU, Blusher, Logic1000 and Djanaba, and live performances by daine, Robert Baxter and more.
It’s PNAU’s first time at the event, which prides itself on being Australia’s most inclusive and accessible music festival and sends 100% of its proceeds to the Dylan Alcott Foundation.
Ability Fest
- When: Saturday 11 April
- Where: The Timber Yard
- Tickets on sale here
Check out our gig guide, our festival guide, our live music venue guide and our nightclub guide. Follow us on Instagram here.
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“I’m really looking forward to meeting Dylan because I haven’t met him before and everyone seems to love the guy,” says PNAU’s Peter Mayes. “It’s amazing what he’s doing, and it’s so cool that the tickets are 60 bucks. I’ve definitely played at some festivals with a ticket for 10-times that.”
Mayes and his PNAU co-leader Nick Littlemore have been making music together for more than 30 years. Since their debut album, Sambanova, came out in 1999, PNAU have collaborated with Ladyhawke, Luke Steele, Troye Sivan and Khalid, won multiple ARIA Awards, and released a chart-topping album with Elton John.
But the duo’s earliest forays into electronic production were far from glamorous. “We were making bleeped up sounds through a guitar amp in a shed in Nick’s backyard in the mid 90s,” says Mayes.
PNAU’s staying power is impressive given the trend-based nature of commercial dance music. They’re currently working on a follow-up to 2024’s Hyperbolic, and their two latest singles, Light Me Up and Rollin, are evidence of Mayes and Littlemore’s continued interest in experimenting with their songwriting formula.
Light Me Up is a collaboration with French producer Kungs. “That was more his creation and Nick just did the vocal, basically. And even I did a small amount of falsetto on that,” Mayes says.
Rollin features Italian house trio Meduza. “Love those guys,” Mayes says. “We worked with them in LA a couple of years ago. That’s the only time I really met them in person, and it was great.”
PNAU’s next single, Tu Corazón, will arrive on 10 April. It’s a collaboration with Mexican sibling trio The Warning.
“They’re a hard rock band from Monterey in Mexico,” Mayes says. “It wasn’t something that they’d done before, singing on a dance record, but it worked. Sometimes that’s really exciting for us, to take people out of their usual genre and do something different for them, but also different for us in the sense that it’s a vocal sound that doesn’t happen in dance music every day.”
PNAU’s willingness to think outside the confines of genre has been a major asset throughout their three-decade career. Mayes says this attitude was informed by their origins in the mid-90s dance scene.
“We grew up in a time in the rave scene and in electronic music where it wasn’t so microgenre focused,” he says. “There were definitely parties that had a sound, but you would go out and hear everything that was available at that time in one night and even within one DJ set.”
This ethos will underscore PNAU’s DJ set at Ability Fest, Mayes says.
“Playing an hour is pretty short for a DJ format, but you try and have pockets where you’re like, I’m going to go here and do something really weird and squeeze in a track with no vocal that’s pretty weird.”
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PNAU mega-fans needn’t fret, however, as a significant chunk of the set will be devoted to the band’s original material.
“I’ve been working on the set, and right now there’s probably seven or eight PNAU songs within an hour,” Mayes says. “They’re all custom versions, longer versions or just different arrangements, different productions, different tempos and all that kind of stuff. So I try and make them the bigger moments in the set.”
This year’s Ability Fest marks the first time that the event has gone all-in on electronic music. The festival site will be fitted out with a wide range of accessible features, including elevated viewing platforms, quiet zones, sensory areas, Auslan interpreters and live captioning, as well as dedicated parking and pick-up/drop-off zones, accessible bathrooms and changing places, a designated assistance dog area, and the Bindi Maps navigation app.
PNAU can’t wait to get involved. “Dylan’s just doing great things for the community,” Mayes says. “And with all the crazy crap going on in the world right now, it’s so great, because there’s not that much good news right now.”
Ability Fest is on at The Timber Yard on Saturday 11 April. More details here.
This article was made in partnership with Untitled.
