City Recital Hall’s new music feast, the micro-festival Extended Play, has quickly become an eagerly awaited annual event, with the second iteration of the 12-hour extravaganza co-curated by City Recital Hall and Lyle Chan taking over every corner of the venue on Saturday. It was a hard ask to out-do last year’s Extended Play – which brought together ensembles from around the country, with US group Bang on a Can All-Stars headlining – but Chan and the team at City Recital Hall pulled it off, creating an immersive experience that matched the previous year’s excitement, but with a different flavour resulting from a whole new line-up of artists and music, headlined by the Queen of the Toy Piano, Margaret Leng Tan.

Margaret Leng Tan at Extended Play. Photo © Katelyn-Jane Dunn

For new music fans in Sydney the event is an opportunity to hear some of the groups from around Australia that might not tour here often, if at all. Brisbane-based Nonsemble, which kicked off the festival in the auditorium, for instance, made its Sydney debut with two signature audio-visual...