The 13th Totally Huge New Music Festival has kicked off in Perth with workshops by artists in residence Anne Le Baron and Speak Percussion, a late-night improvisation club, a sound installation, a young artists’ concert and an electronics/multimedia performance.

On Tuesday night Decibel performed a programme of eight electronic concerto commissions.

Like most of their programmes, Decibel took the traditional understanding of the concerto and blew it out of the water. The soloist instruments in the spotlight were the Theremin, Trautonium, laptop, loudspeakers, Moog synthesiser, toys, electric harp and bass guitar. Paired with the six electro-acoustic performers from Decibel, the sonic potential was almost limitless and invariably interesting.

As Decibel director Cat Hope said in her programme notes, the focus was not virtuosity but rather “to challenge the way we think about our relationship to electronic instruments as performers and audience.”

It wasn’t bombastic. Pedro Alvarez’s Intersperso-Ultradiano featuring Cat Hope on electric bass came close with its squealing white noise cadenza, but much of the concerto was played with extreme sensitivity by the ensemble and the guitar was often unamplified – effectively mute.

Rather the challenges came as more subtle inversions. In Johannes Mulder’s Stolen Goods (stocketus) the material for the soloist (a stack...