Overview
Melbourne's relationship with music has been drifting somewhere more reverent lately — listening bars where conversation drops to a murmur, represses queued for like sneakers, sound systems discussed with the seriousness once reserved for wine lists. The city's newest deep-listening room takes that devotion to its logical end. It isn't in a bar at all. It's inside a museum, it holds 40 people, and after dark you'll need to win a ballot to get in.
The ACMI Listening Room sits at the centre of The Vinyl Factory: Reverb, the multi-sensory exhibition ACMI and RISING have brought to Fed Square from London's 180 Studios. By day, it's an acoustically tuned sanctuary open during exhibition hours, where visitors can pull records from The Vinyl Factory's archive of 100 pressings — Massive Attack, Grace Jones and Daft Punk among them — and hear them through an Australian-designed and manufactured Pitt & Giblin sound system.
After hours is a different proposition. Until Friday, August 28, the room hosts 26 one-off sessions, talks and listening parties at 7pm, featuring "RISING artists who you wouldn't usually get to see up close". The first drop of artists has been curated by Yasmine Sharaf — presenter of Triple R's Cease + Desist and a specialist in underground sounds — alongside Robin Fox from MESS, with more names still to be announced.
The catch is that you can't simply book. Each session is capped at around 40 listeners, and tickets are allocated entirely by ballot. Buying a ticket to the Reverb exhibition ($25 full, $15 students) earns one ballot entry per order, and you can nominate every session you'd like to attend on a single form. Ballots are drawn a week before each session, and winners have 48 hours to confirm one or two spots before their place is redrawn.
The ballot is worth entering even if you only make it as far as the exhibition itself, which runs until Monday, August 31 (closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays) and gathers immersive works from Stan Douglas, Jenn Nkiru, William Kentridge, Jeremy Deller, Virgil Abloh and Kahlil Joseph, among others — including a six-hour jam film set in a reconstruction of 'The Church', the legendary New York studio. Forty strangers, one record, a room built for nothing else — it may be the quietest big night out in the city.
The Vinyl Factory: Reverb runs at ACMI, Fed Square until Monday, August 31. For tickets and Listening Room ballot entry, visit the ACMI website.