Most live electronic music is designed to overpower the room it's played in.
Nikita Zabelin’s Ground does the opposite. The Moscow-based sound artist’s audiovisual performance works with architecture, not against it — using lasers, modular synthesis, projection and sand to transform a single space into something between a listening chamber and a sensory installation. On 5 June, it takes over the Norla Dome at the Mission to Seafarers in Docklands, and the pairing might be the most considered venue match Melbourne has seen in a while.
The Norla Dome is a 17-metre concrete dome with exposed brick walls, originally built as a gymnasium for visiting seafarers at Melbourne’s port. It has no windows. It seats around 120 people. And its acoustics are extreme — the kind of room where a whispered conversation from one side can be heard clearly on the other. It’s a space that tends to impose itself on whatever happens inside it, which is exactly why it works for a project like Ground.
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Zabelin, the founder of Moscow label and artist collective Resonance Moscow, built Ground around the idea of longform tonal immersion. Rather than a DJ set or a conventional live electronic performance, the show unfolds as a single sustained environment — a laser positioned at the highest point of the space casts a cone of light down to a circular base, while Zabelin manipulates a modular synthesiser to generate sounds in real time. Sand and projections complete the picture. The audience sits inside the work rather than watching it from the outside.
The performance has been staged across Europe in some deliberately unusual settings — at LUZA festival in Portugal, Berlin’s LOST festival, and 43 metres underground in an actual bunker. Zabelin has also collaborated with Greenpeace, recording a piece in the Ulyanovsk region in support of environmentally friendly energy transition. Ground’s Melbourne edition, presented by Soundcheck and Platform Presents, follows a smaller first Australian showing last October that was hampered by last-minute visa approvals.
That initial visit, though, proved something crucial about the Norla Dome. Ivan Kyrov of Soundcheck, who first brought Zabelin to Australia independently before partnering with Platform Presents for this return, makes a strong case for the pairing.
“I’d argue the Norla Dome is the definitive space for a work like Ground,” Kyrov says. “While it has been used for dance music, the architecture creates heavy natural reverb and echo, which makes tightly rhythmic music difficult to translate clearly. Ground, built around ambient, noise and experimental sound, fits naturally within that environment.”
That fit became literal during a rehearsal at the Dome last October. “We tested the space together and the reverb was so strong he removed the reverb module from his setup entirely,” Kyrov says. “In this case, the space becomes a collaborator, actively shaping the sound rather than just containing it.”
An artist removing part of their own equipment because the building already does the job says more about Ground’s relationship to space than any press release could. A room designed for century-old gymnastics routines, it turns out, produces exactly the kind of natural resonance that a modular synthesiser performance can lean into rather than fight.
Ground isn’t a club night and it isn’t a gallery opening. It occupies a space between the two that Melbourne events rarely commit to fully — one where the sound, the light, the architecture and the materials on the floor are all treated as part of the same composition. Whether that registers as an art experience or a music experience probably depends on where you’re standing when the laser hits the sand.
Ground takes place on 5 June at the Norla Dome, Mission to Seafarers, 717 Flinders St, Docklands. Presented by Soundcheck and Platform Presents.
