Trippy chill-out on bean-bags provides classical food for thought.

The Edge, State Library of Queensland, Brisbane
May 15, 2015

The second main event in the Queensland Symphony Orchestra mini-series celebrating new music saw a subsection of the orchestra doing their thing confined to a small room with a bar and beanbags, while a pair of Melbourne-based hipsters spun the electronics. Too pop? Not really classical music? Rubbish. Having just emerged from a formal presentation of some ‘real’ new classical, the connection to this blissful hour of chill-out was immediately apparent and left you plenty of room to mull over what we miss sitting upright in rows in the stuffy, starchy concert halls of today.

First the music. Tim Shiel has been a staple of the Melbourne electronica scene for a decade, collaborating and touring with Gotye among others while producing couple of hit albums along the way. This concert was a reworking of his recent sound design for the iOS game Duet (named one of the most elegant games of 2013 in The New Yorker) and came in the form of six or seven seamlessly woven tracks (or maybe it was eight or nine – it was that seamless) performed...