Contemporary music ensemble Rubiks Collective opened its 2019 season with a focus on technology: how it can “reveal, obscure and transform our perceptions and innermost desires”. Lasting about an hour, this program of five works revealed that while technology permeates our daily lives, it is by no means a panacea, and certain age-old dilemmas remain. These dilemmas about how we relate to the world and each other were explored in a variety of musical expressions, aided by various visual media, some of which were projected onto muslin-like cloths, hung like so many flags in a military hall. 

Rubiks Collective. Photograph supplied

Anna Clyne’s Fits + Starts was commissioned as a dance score and features a solo cello against a prerecorded tape. Gemma Kneale negotiated with great empathy the expansive and technically variegated solo part; underlining the various changes in mood and texture, and interacting well the tape whose manipulated cello, viola and harpsichord utterances ranged from lyrical to disturbing. Accompanying the music were projections of abstract images reminiscent of birds and clouds against a cyclo-blue sky.

Crackles by Neo Hueckler, given its Australian premiere, features three female...