K Mak is the strongest hallucinogen known to humanity.
Watching K Mak as part of FRINGE WORLD at the Scitech Planetarium is a majestic beauty of cosmic proportions. It is the closest thing you will ever get to a DMT trip without actually being on drugs. K Mak was interstellar. I literally picked my jaw up off the floor at multiple points, and I am certainly no slack-jawed yokel; it was simply that sumptuous.
This show is a sonic and visual tour of everything under the cosmos, from the heavenly bodies to dancing magma, water, and quicksilver. 18-foot electric jellyfish undulated with abandon. 20-foot flowers rhythmically unfurled and refurled. At points, I felt like this was how angels (if they were real) felt watching the universe being created. At other times, it was so overwhelming that I imagined that I was having an attack of Stendhal syndrome, something I only experienced once before at the Sistine Chapel in Rome.
K Mak (Kathryn Mckee) is Queensland’s answer to Bjork. She sounds like a sonic pixie girl par excellence but with the composure of a classically trained musician. McKee sings and plays the synth as part of a four-piece in a genre-bending, classical/EDM fusion.
Halfway through the show, McKee had a giveaway, which was a free download attached to a frisbee. In her own words, she has been “banned from throwing it into the audience at planetariums.” She then hand-delivered it, running up into the audience. This was both kitsch and cute.
To offer any negative critique almost seems mean, given that it was one of the most moving gigs I have ever been to, and I have literally been to see two huge international bands just this week. McKee’s vocals transported me from single-celled organisms to the deepest parts of the galaxy and beyond. Filling the space, not designed for shows of this ilk, would be hard as all hell, but she pulled it off with aplomb. Her voice only lost its resonance for two seconds in the hour-long show.
The only other thing that didn’t land was the footage of a USA space rocket launch, which was spliced into four sections and didn’t completely fit the entire dome, unlike all the other visuals. The other issue with the sequence was that to frame space travel solely through the US rubric smacks of American imperialism, but perhaps this says more about my ideological predisposition than anything else. And all in all, these tiny flaws only serve to make the diamond.
Sitting under the 180-degree dome, staring straight at its centre, the visuals take up all but a millimetre of your periphery vision. Whilst I am no psychiatrist, being in such a space with such intense visuals, I would suggest that people with photogenic epilepsy should probably give this show a pass. Everyone else, dig in and enjoy the blissed-out trip sans comedown.
C.J. O’HARTE
K Mak at the Planetarium sold out its short run from 17 – 19 Jan 2025 at The Scitech Planetarium for FRINGE WORLD, but for more information about the event click here.
