The new live music and performance space, located within the multi-faceted arts venue Light, will be unveiled this weekend, with performances by loop wizard Adam Page, blues cabaret diva Carla Lippis, techno producer DJ TR!P and more.

Launching this weekend, The Lab is a 300-capacity live music venue located within new West End arts hub Light, and boasts a performance space lined with 50sqm of LED video screens.

The audio-visual set up will allow musicians incorporate immersive visuals into their sets, or even build some kind of Blade Runner-esque dystopian neon hellscape, if their art should call for such a thing.

The Lab is the first part of Light – an ambitious multi-storey creative start-up – which will open in stages over the coming months.

Light will combine visual arts, food and music all under one roof, in a 140-year-old building on Light Square, and will open completely to the public on Thursday, 24 February.

The hope is that Light’s multi-faceted offering will create a new kind of financial support structure for arts venues.

“If we confined ourselves to the normal view, we would not do this,” says Light co-founder Nick Dunstone, who spoke with CityMag about the venue for our upcoming print edition.

“If we all stayed within our confines, no one would try to do anything differently.”

The Lab’s program is curated by Music SA chair Anne Wiberg, and this weekend the venue’s bill includes four sessions over two days, featuring electro-guru Adam Page, London-to-Adelaide singer Carla Lippis, hard-hitting mixer DJ TR!P, and more. These artists will also play their own headline shows in the space later this year.

“We want the venue to be an available, accessible and comfortable space where new work is commissioned and people come to play with tech that hasn’t been on offer before,” Anne says.

“We want [it] to become a destination where people don’t know what to expect… but might go because they know we always have something interesting on.”

The Lab will not just be about music, and will incorporate digital arts, theatre, gaming, dance and classical music in its programming. It will offer residencies to creatives, too.

A string of other Lab performances have also been announced, and include Elsy Wameyo, the South Australian Playwright Theatre‘s production of Deep North, and Melbourne electronic music producer Roland Tings.

For more information on The Lab’s launch weekend, visit the website.

You can also read more on Light in CityMag‘s Festivals Edition, with the print mag hitting streets on Thursday, 18 February.