News: Surreal Science reassembles The Scientists and The Surrealists live

Surreal Science arrives as a rare chance to step inside two of Australia’s most disruptive rock lineages without flattening them into nostalgia. Rather than a greatest-hits retelling, this is a live construction built from fragments, overlaps, and collisions, drawing on the shared histories of The Scientists and The Surrealists to create something deliberately unstable and resolutely present.

Across a rotating cast of three drummers, two guitarists, two bass players and two vocalists, the performance pulls from a pool of around 160 songs, reassembled differently each night. The set unfolds thematically rather than chronologically, allowing moods and ideas to bleed into one another. Line-ups shift in real time as different incarnations of the two bands surface and dissolve, moving from abrasion to glide to burn without pause.

The Scientists’ original proposition still sits at the core: a refusal of conventional melody in favour of minimalism, brutality and abstraction, without ever abandoning rock and roll’s physical force. Their work travelled far beyond Australia, quietly feeding into later movements from Seattle grunge to noise-rock and psych-adjacent scenes. That legacy isn’t presented as influence tracing, but as atmosphere, a pressure that still hums beneath the music.

The Surrealists picked up that pressure and redirected it. Where The Scientists stripped things back to the bone, The Surrealists treated everything as usable material. Melody, technique, abstraction and noise coexist rather than cancel each other out. Each performance becomes a kind of salvage operation, not in the sense of rescuing the past, but in reshaping it with intent and curiosity.

Taking place in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth in April, Surreal Science runs as a two-hour performance with an intermission. On stage will be guitarist Tony Thewlis; bassists Boris Sujdovic and Stu Thomas; drummers Clare Moore, Greg Bainbridge and Phil Collings; production engineer Hepburn; and vocalist and guitarist Kim Salmon. Visual material spanning past, present and future iterations of both bands is projected around the performance space, not as illustration but as another shifting layer.

This isn’t framed as a tribute, nor a tidy historical account. It’s an acknowledgement that these bands are part of an ongoing story, one that resists linear explanation. Surreal Science doesn’t narrate so much as immerse, offering a sideways view of how sound, memory and risk continue to shape each other.