Decontamination

Decontamination is a concert series at the RNCM that focuses on new and recent, exploratory and experimental music.

The series features composition and performance from students, staff and visiting artists, many of whom are international leaders in their fields.

Decontamination prioritises the exploratory and adventurous from any area of music making and has featured avant-garde concern music, improvisation, theatrical music and performance, electronic music, folk music, film/video art and pop. 

The starting point for this series was to consider music starting from comparable lines of enquiry leading to very different music. There have been unusual connections, for example, between: the hidden nature of acousmatic music and instrumental music performed in darkness; the relationship between the celebrity and cult status of David Bowie and Pierre Boulez (in the tragic year of their deaths); the veiled nature of Emily Hall’s music of mourning contrasted with Peter Ablinger’s instrumental sounds supressed with white noise, the ideas of erosion in early films by Bill Viola and early music by John Cage, the comparable and contrasting notions of background music from Eric Satie and Brian Eno and; diverse approaches to building new instruments.