For four billion years, the moons Phobos and Deimos have been orbiting Mars, joined by space probes a few decades ago. Echoing the imagination unleashed by Jennifer Walshe in her martian opera, ActeSix and its artistic director Samuel Hengebaert have devised three orbits around Mars for this Insomniaque concert. But here, the orbit is not an astronomical one: it symbolises the way in which we revolve around phenomena that fascinate us whilst transcending our imagination, which we observe and listen to intently.

The evening begins with a musical contemplation of the night sky – and what better way to do this than by lying down? If the concert were taking place outdoors, one might catch sight of Aries and Geminin above Lille. The composer Karheinz Stockhausen painted a portrait of the twelve signs of the zodiac in his cycle Tierkreis. These twelve character pieces form the backbone of the first concert. Originally conceived for music boxes, they can be played ad libitum on various instruments. Amidst the constellations, ActeSix conjures up, like meteorites, fragments of music from different eras, ranging from Biber to Penderecki and Sofia Gubaidulina. Like human responses to our fascination with the sky.

When the astronomer Carl Sagan and his team selected the contents of the “Golden Records” carried on board the two Voyager probes, launched in 1977, they brought together Bach, Mozart and Beethoven alongside Chuck Berry, as well as songs from different cultures. These choices were intended to represent our humanity in a message in a bottle addressed to potential extraterrestrials. In the second concert of the evening, ActeSix takes a somewhat different approach by posing this question: what would remain of our music if we were to leave Earth? Drawing on Luciano Berio’s Folk Songs and the figure of Cathy Berberian, the collective imagines a sort of musical time capsule: languages, melodies, dances and traditions passed down from one generation to the next, transformed by travel and memory.

The third concert explores our perception of time until it becomes disrupted, through repetitive music ranging from the earliest Baroque ostinatos to the works of Philip Glass and Julius Eastman. Acoustic rhythms are interwoven with electronic loops. This renewed focus on listening is inspired by Pauline Oliveros, a pioneer of electronic music, whose practice of “Deep Listening” invites us not merely to look at space, but to try to listen to it.

Ticket sales open on 13 October at 1:30 pm