A new boutique festival by a local record label will take over Rhino Room and Low Life Basement Bar in August with Adelaide headliner Placement, two Victorian heavyweights and more.

PAK Records will take over the Pirie Street venue with Round and Round, featuring five hours of live music across two stages with live visuals, DJs and a PAK Pop-up shop. 

PAK is a local Adelaide record label and live events collective that’s the brainchild of Jessi Tilbrook and Sam Szabo. It started in 2013 when they noticed a disconnect in the live music market: local bands weren’t playing nightclubs. PAK changed that and expanded from events into a record label in 2021. 

The label represents local heavyweights The Empty Threats, Coldwave, Ella Ion and more.

PAK was originally established in 2013 as Punk Ass Kids by Sam and Jessi (L–R) This picture: Angela Skujins

Headlining the Low-Life Basement Bar stage for Round and Round is Placement, a noise rock band that celebrates guitars and has a collective nostalgia for grimy 90s bands. 

Lead vocalist and guitarist Malia Werle says Placement is “pretty picky” when it comes to gigging. 

“We don’t play every gig, we really consider if we think it will go well,” she says. 

“For Round and Round, we’re really happy to play because we love PAK, they always do a really good job with it, they’re awesome humans, they curate a good lineup so you think, ‘yeah, that’s something I want to play’.

“It’s hard to put on a curated lineup and it’s hard to run music projects and bring people over from interstate and [PAK] consistently do really good work in that space, so we’re always happy to work with them.”

Placement. This picture: Nash Blight

For Round and Round, PAK has secured Victorian pop-folk artist Leah Senior as their interstate headliner. This is Leah’s first time in Adelaide in five years, after touring her fourth album The Music That I Make around the USA. 

Joining Leah is Melbourne punk-rock four-piece Porpoise Spit, whose debut album Don’t Quit was released in 2023 on vinyl and digital streaming platforms. 

The line-up features PAK’s post-punk band Coldwave, known for their high-octane live set plus local favourites Swapmeet, War Room, The Munch, Kurralta Park and DJ XXXquisite. 

Placement Guitarist Alex Dearman says they’ve been lucky to be a part of shows with “some really killer local lineups” but they have noticed young people are experiencing culture in different ways as the cost of living is making people re-think how they go to gigs. 

“I think it’s interesting when I was younger, people used to complain about an entry fee to a show and then they’d go and spend $100 on beers, whereas now I feel the young people they’re really happy to pay $20 or $30 to support local music,” he says. 

Placement says from an artist’s perspective, PAK plays a crucial role and without them, the local scene would look different. 

“They do it in a way that is successful, and really smart, they do it professionally,” Alex says. 

“They’ve been supporting so many great local bands for so long…their goal is not a financial one or popularity, it’s to prop up art they believe in.” 

Round and Round is at Rhino Room and the Lowlife Basement Bar on Saturday, August 10. It’s an 18+ event. Tickets are $35 and available to purchase via Humantix.