Ensemble Offspring is not your usual chamber ensemble, and fittingly, Lumen Machine is not your usual program: four world premieres (three Aussie); four specially-arranged miniatures pulled from an installation works featuring dodgem cars.

Chamber techno, new music mayhem …  for the first concert of its 30th anniversary year, EO goes big and bold, and invites London-based piano alumnus Zubin Kanga back home to join the party with a range of strange tech in his arsenal.

For German-Austrian composer Brigitta Muntendorf’s Weight and Load #2, Kanga performs a beautifully brash “virtual piano” on two purple lasers and sensors, which spill onto the ceiling above him. There’s a daring threat in its chordal stabs which begin to wobble as it slowly phases’ a fearless thesis to the rest of the performance.

Amanda Cole’s Dream Garden is a first chamber venture with the Lumatone, a programmable Canadian instrument designed for microtonal performance. There’s a wonky warmness in Cole’s tonal world and her bespoke 48-note scale, both calming and yet strangely alien, cleverly indulges in EO’s capacity to similarly toy with intonation – as Kanga unravels this strange sonic territory, each instrumentalist responds to it with careful delicacy.

In his...