Through an enclosed brick alleyway and up a fire escape. This is how you enter the “listening club”. The room is dark. Small wooden tables litter the space—each illuminated by a single lamp. One chair, one rotary phone, and one switchboard sit at every table. You take a seat. Although no one in the room is speaking, the hum of different voices can be heard from all around, as well as the crackle of a phone line. You pick up the receiver and hold it to your ear.
 
The Nightline is an immersive audio installation, presented at The Malthouse Theatre. Audience members listen to real-life anonymous voice messages left by Melburnians on The Nightline number between the hours of midnight and 6 am to answer the question, “Why are you awake?”
 
 Listening to a stranger’s voice on a phone was a strangely intimate experience. There was every feature you would expect during a phone call with a loved one—moments of silence, coughs and the sound of static. There was also a great sense of distance. You act as a passive listener, able to hop between phone lines at will, tuning in and out of any number of nighttime ramblings as an imperceptible witness.
 
From insomniacs and night-shift workers to migrants missing home, there was a sense of familiarity with each call, and it was interesting to tune into the cadence and accent of every voice. There were also surprises—it was an odd thing to switch lines and cut in mid-recording to hear someone crying on the other end. Some calls provided an insight into the physical spaces of the speaker, with whispered voices in thin-walled apartments and the sound of early morning birdsong. Yet, layered across everything was a sense of loneliness inherent to the darkness at dawn—a feeling shared with the listener through the phone. 
 
There are reminders of the physical space the audience occupies, however, with well-timed interruptions that bring attention to the collective experience of listening. Surveying the room is a “Nightline concierge” played by Katia Molino, whose silent and authoritarian presence creates a tension beyond the calls themselves. Her occasional movement throughout the room was confounding and her position above the audience offered little clarity on the scene we had stepped into. Are we wiretappers tasked with surveilling the nighttime confessions of Melburnians? Or perhaps we are merely employees of “The Nightline”, acting as the silent observers of these messages. Occasionally, the contents of the calls themselves became externalised in the room’s soundscape, raising questions as to how much of what we are listening to is under our control and how much is part of a broader narrative.
 
The experience is short—less than forty minutes—and I could have easily gone longer tuning in and out of different messages. With the audience in control over who to listen to and for how long, I imagine the emotional impact of the experience could be easily undermined with mindless switching. However, the sheer variety of emotion in the calls is impactful regardless of which combination each audience member encounters.
 
The Nightline is an ongoing project, with previous seasons taking the audio installation concept around Australia and abroad. The lead artists behind the project are director Roslyn Oades and sound artist Bob Scott, whose vision of weaving late-night reflections into an immersive experience is continually renewed by those who decide to call. 
 
The phone call may be a dying art, but The Nightline imagines it as a form of human connection and a supplement to lonely hours. After leaving the experience and stepping into real night, I suddenly felt a new sense of life in the darkness. Although it was not yet close to morning, I was keenly aware of the life going on around me as I walked through the Melbourne streets. Lit windows and the sound of cutlery through open doors seemed now representative of the diversity of human experience. Next time I find myself unable to sleep in the dark, I might just pick up the phone instead.