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After 9pm, the Festival opens two parallel spaces that show Castlemaine after dark in a completely different light. Theatre Royal and the Maxi IGA underground car park run side by side — one historic, one unlikely — each offering its own take on contemporary electronic music.
At Theatre Royal, Intermood set the tone with their blend of instrumental psychedelic jazz and high-energy neo-disco — a sound sharpened in tight Naarm rooms and on festival stages. They’re joined by Harvey Sutherland (DJ Set), a producer, DJ and synthesist known for treating dance music as both craft and conversation. His sets — warm, detailed and quietly intricate — draw from disco, jazz and analogue electronics, creating something considered without losing its sense of play.
Running alongside is the space most out-of-towners never see coming: the Maxi IGA underground car park, reimagined as a one-night-only club.
The concrete stays concrete; the atmosphere shifts entirely.
Local selector Tom Barker works with percussive frameworks and low-frequency weight — the kind of set built from the ground up.
Naarm-based DJs Pjenné and Millú bring two distinct approaches to the underground: Pjenné’s hypnotic, trance-adjacent leftfield selections, and Millú’s spacious, progressive grooves shaped by years inside the city’s queer and experimental scenes.
Take either path — both lead somewhere worth staying.
As Castlemaine State Festival marks fifty years, Opening Night After Dark feels less like a spectacle and more like a shift in perspective: familiar places meeting new ideas, and the town showing the range it’s always had.
