With a fast-growing reputation in Melbourne and among Australian new-music circles, Rubiks Collective opened their 2017 series last Sunday with a concert inspired by the personality’s darker side: the second self. Inner evil twins, shadow selves, and private personae were the models for this intense programme, that served as a reminder to look out for friends and loved ones who may be cultivating a second self, and hiding their depression behind a public mask. The musical result of this exploration was a concert surveying some of the most cutting-edge sound imaginations in contemporary music, and none of it written before 2005.

Rubiks cellist Gemma Tomlinson opened the concert with Missy Mazzoli’s psychedelic A Thousand Tongues (2009), joined partway through by special guest mezzo Lotte Betts-Dean. Tomlinson delivered controlled, full melodic lines that were gradually enveloped in a thick, ambient electronic accompaniment. Betts-Dean’s pure, alluring mezzo timbre was a beautiful feature of this sound world, intoning the haunting words of a Stephen Crane poem beginning, “Yes, I have a thousand tongues, And nine and ninety-nine lie”.

Dutch avant-garde composer Jacob TV’s sonic portrait of Marilyn Munroe Able to Be shattered the dreaminess of the opening work. In this dark exploration of the...