Not all music was made for public consumption.

The Secret Noise takes you under the veil to explore the realm of secret music. From sacred forms of ceremonial music and legally extinguished compositions, to ‘backmasking’ (playing an LP backwards to reveal a subliminal, satanic message), private love songs, and the proliferation of personal music players, Ensemble Offspring poetically and playfully explore the threshold of music-making as a public and private exchange.

Staged throughout Arts House, audiences will be guided through, and seduced by, a series of surreal, intimate scenes that hover somewhere between music, dance and live installation.

Composer Damien Ricketson’s striking, other- worldly soundscape, in which he combines traditional instruments with fantastical fricative objects and whirling devices of his own design, is beautifully realised by musicians alongside a cast of dancers and an actor.

A pioneering and genre-bending force in Australian new music, Sydney-based Ensemble Offspring’s recent collaborators include fellow free radicals Mike Patton, Speak Percussion and composer-inventor Jon Rose. Virtuosic and visceral, The Secret Noise continues the ensemble’s exploration into emerging music practices, inviting us in as voyeur and accomplice.