Psychedelic Chaos Meets Sonic Beauty: Virgin Vacation Storm Shotkickers
Hong Kong’s experimental indie force Virgin Vacation will ignite Shotkickers, Thornbury on Saturday 11 October with their genre-bending live show.
Since forming in 2018, the quartet have defied categorisation, blending krautrock, free jazz, post-punk, surf, ambience and electronica into what WIRE Magazine calls a “weird mix of controlled chaos.” Their debut album Dapple Patterns (2024) was nominated at the Taiwan GIMA Awards and named among Asia’s “Top Album Releases” of the year.
Virgin Vacation’s live shows are an all-consuming experience — a tight rhythmic engine fuelling improvisation, strange textures and sonic surprises. Their sets are a rare mix of precision and abandon, taking audiences from hypnotic repetition to explosive noise. Recent tours have seen them storm major festivals including Clockenflap Hong Kong, Lucfest Taiwan, BiKN Tokyo and Offside Festival Hangzhou.
The band — Wing Chan (guitar, synths, glockenspiel), Step Ip (drums, percussion, programming), Kuro (bass) and James Hedges (guitar, synths, percussion) — are currently touring Asia and bringing Dapple Patterns to life with a cross-disciplinary performance that fuses sound, storytelling and design.
Critics have hailed the album as an “instant classic” (Music Darwin), while the Hong Kong Music Critics Society named Virgin Vacation one of the “Top Five Bands of the Year.” Their Shotkickers performance promises to be a mind-bending journey that Melbourne audiences won’t forget.
Virgin Vacation – Live at Shotkickers
Saturday, 11 October 2025
Shotkickers, Thornbury VIC
TICKETS ON THE DOOR
Follow Virgin Vacation: Instagram | Facebook | Spotify
ABOUT THE SHOW:
**Virgin Vacation**, a Hong Kong indie experimental rock group known for their unique blend of Post Rock, Math Rock, Krautrock, Free Jazz, and Electronica, are bringing their debut album “Dapple Patterns” to Australia for the first time. Experience their exclusive full band set at Shotkickers in Melbourne, featuring special touring saxophonist Tomii Chan, co-presented by ARCtistry and Far Out Distant Sounds. This is their first full set performance in Australia, showcasing the album’s blend of structured and free-form music. Don’t miss this cross-disciplinary art project encompassing storytelling and design.
Supporting them are:
**USER**:** **Melbourne-based four-piece USER (Andrew Nunns, Frank Galgano, Lisa Gibbs & Daryl Bradie) craft a visceral blend of alternative electronic and shadowy postpunk, wrapped in immersive visuals and a brooding, theatrical energy. Described as “timely, relevant and thought-provoking,” USER captures the tension and instability of the now—slinky, slithering, defiant.
**Silzedrek **is the latest in a long list of aliases of Tarquin Manek. This project was conceived to explore clarinet and bass clarinet in a live setting utilising the Eastern European and Roma sonorities of the artist’s heritage. As a mainstay and central figure in the current Oz underground scene Manek is adept at employing higher dub logicto the rough juxtapositions and seemingly abrupt left turns his performances can take.