The experimental music specialists will receive electric shocks while performing live on stage in Sydney.

The Australian Art Quartet is renowned for its boundary-busting performance methods, and its 2016 season is set to be electrifying – literally.

The Quartet’s six-concert series that aims to “blur the boundaries between performer, audience, art form, time and place” begins this week, and for their third concert – titled Shocking Cliches – the quartet will play while receiving shocks of up to 50 volts. “I’ve touched an electric fence before,” says violinist Dan Russell in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, “but this is the first time we’ve done this. I haven’t been electrocuted before.”

Joining Russell for the performance will be violinist Hayley Bullock, violist Leo Kram, and James Beck, the quartet’s cellist and artistic director. The four will tape wires to their bare skin, and then tape themselves to their instruments.  The shocks will occur at random intervals as the musicians perform Pachelbel’s Canon in D and Michaela Davies’ Untitled for Cyborg String Quartet, creating a new form of performance where the musicians ultimately have no control over their...