Canberra International Music Festival | Luminescence and the Machine
Sunday May 3, Street Theatre, Canberra, ACT
Artists
Luminescence Chamber Singers
AJ America, Artistic Director
Josephine Brereton
Lucien Fischer
Rachel Mink
Alasdair Stretch
Dan Walker
with
Tilman Robinson (sound design, instrument design, compositional collaboration and live sound)
Veronique Bennet (Lighting & Set Design)
Composers
William Brittelle (USA)
Olivia Davies
Jess Green
Jessica O’Donoghue
Damien Ricketson
Tilman Robinson
Marcus Whale
Sam Weiss
Dan Walker
Ok, it was clear from the get go that this was not the Luminescence Chamber Singers many will have come expecting.
Gone, at least for now, was the pristine early music vocal blend, the architectural clarity of Renaissance polyphony. In its place: cables, ducts, cold light and a sprawling, sci-fi apparatus that looked like it had been salvaged from a crashed spacecraft (or a Dr Who set). How coooool! Each singer stood wired into the system, armed with a mini MIDI controller, their voices no longer just produced but processed, looped, fractured and reassembled in real time.
As Artistic Director AJ America writes, “a vocal ensemble is already kind of a machine… a complex interdependent system.” Here, that idea was pushed to its limit. Amplification was not about volume, but about control – or perhaps the surrender of it? – reshaping the voice into something unstable, but also something shared. “In this web of inputs and outputs,” America notes, “one singer’s vocal choices reprocess the sound of someone else, and the ensemble morphs into a single bionic organism… We control the machine, the machine controls us, all at once.” That sense of entanglement defined the program.
Twelve world premieres moved restlessly across styles and ideas. Tilman Robinson’s opening Enshittification set the tone: punchy and abrasive. Elsewhere, textures veered from heavy, crashing electronica to something closer to pop or disco, to meditative soundscapes that dissolved into abstraction. There was movement, gesture, flashes of theatricality. At times it felt like a pop gig; at others a performance art installation – you know the ones, where no one is entirely sure what’s going on, but no one is quite willing to admit it?
The staging, designed by Veronique Benett, was integral. Light and space extended the sound world, placing us right inside the machine rather than in front of it. Coloured washes, pulsing states, and shadowed figures gave the sense that the singers were not just performing, but operating within — or perhaps being operated by — the system itself.
So what of the music?
Bravo to the vocalists who navigated an immense cognitive load, balancing highly precise vocal production with live digital manipulation. At times I thought they could have loosened more into the theatrical possibilities the music hinted at, but the concentration required was undeniable, and perhaps added to the overall aesthetic. Text, when present, was often subsumed by the very technology meant to transform it. Words blurred, dissolved, or became secondary to texture. Whether intentional or not, it created a distance – but for some pieces that was actually used to great effect.
Among the standouts, for me at least, Dan Walker’s Collider allowed the ensemble’s core vocal strength to re-emerge, the electronics supporting rather than dominating. Damien Ricketson’s Kahtehpah was particularly striking, imagining the ensemble as “a fantastical human barrel organ of fleshy pipes and stops” — wordless, breath-driven, visceral, culminating in a final, spent exhalation. It was strangely beautiful.
Jessica O’Donoghue’s The Republic of Motherhood offered one of the evening’s most affecting moments. Built around Liz Berry’s poem of the same name, its looping phrases “feeding,cleaning,loving,feeding” unfolded through layers of spoken word and vocal response, the electronics amplifying both intimacy and overwhelm. It captured, with unsettling clarity, the dualities of care.
Sam Weiss’s Creation lingered too, posing the uneasy question of usefulness in a human–machine world. Its opening questions posed by Fink “Do you need something?” “Can I help?” landed with unexpected vulnerability, before dissolving into a more ambiguous exchange between human and artificial voices. It made me imagine being in a confused state, deep in my own subconscious like emerging from a coma, desperate for human contact but not quite trusting the source of a helpful voice – creepy.
Marcus Whale’s for Derek Jarman, saw the set bathed in deep blue light, it created a hypnotic fusion of text, drone and image, while William Brittelle’s contributions, interspersed throughout the program, leaned into sharp irony and dark humour, the often 80s-inflected aesthetic offering a deliberate tonal shift.
The final work, Jess Green’s Machine Translation, embraced the absurdity and unease of machine language with fragmented syllables, and distorted text coalescing into something both alien and familiar. It built to a chaotic, pulsing climax.
This was not an easy program to “read” in a traditional sense. Nor was it meant to be. If anything, it aligned Luminescence more closely with groups like Roomful of Teeth than with their own recent Tenebrae explorations — a deliberate experimental shift toward music-making that is more explorative and intentionally unstable.
It was ambitious and unapologetically strange, but still, it felt like something well worth hearing. And perhaps more importantly, well worth continuing. And, so, the Canberra International Music Festival expands my mind yet again!! What a weekend.
Photo credit: Peter Hislop
READ OTHER REVIEWS OF CIMF on ClassikON >>
Pianos & Percussion: Festival Finale >
Luminescence and the Machine >
