“Luminescence, like its namesake in nature, is a phenomenon.”
Comprised of six professional singers, Luminescence champions our original and most versatile instrument: the human voice. Led by AJ America, Luminescence is rapidly emerging as one of Australia's most adventurous ensembles, and has built an enviable reputation as a uniquely versatile ensemble, performing repertoire that spans renaissance polyphony, folk song, and contemporary art music of all kinds.
Luminescence develops and performs a wide range of artistic projects, including an extensive commissioning and creative development program and an wide array of outreach, music education, and youth arts programs. Since 2015, Luminescence has commissioned more than 60 new works, often in close collaboration with Roland Peelman, a long-time collaborator, conductor, and artistic mentor for the singers.
During 2023-2024, Luminescence recorded and released their first studio recordings, including new music by Australian composers Dan Walker, Jess Green, and Leah Blankendaal. Luminescence’s debut album, Of The Body, was recorded in April 2024, and was released with ABC Classics on 12 December 2025.
LUMINESCENCE PROJECTS (SELECTED)
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GESUALDO TENEBRAE
More than 400 years later, the music of Carlo Gesualdo still seems strikingly avant-garde. Luminescence presents the complete Gesualdo Tenebrae Responsories over 2025-2026-2027.
Translating literally to ‘darkness’, the plural form of ‘Tenebrae’ is fitting; it implies a multiplicity, all-encompassing shadows; a plunge into darknesses of both deeply personal grief and of universal sorrow.
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LUMINESCENCE AND THE MACHINE
The primal force of the human voice meets the vast machinery of the digital age. Amplified, rewired, and supercharged.
Developed in collaboration with GRAMMY Award winning producer/composer William Brittelle and GRAMMY Award winning bass Cameron Beauchamp (Roomful of Teeth), LUMINESCENCE AND THE MACHINE probes the porous boundary between the human and bionic. Ground-breaking electronic architecture enables each singer to digitally manipulate their own voice in real-time, and triggers a complex web of reflexive, inter-dependent effects and unleashing new sonic possibilities for vocal ensembles.
An audacious new music project, where technology and humanity hum in dangerous, dazzling harmony.
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RED DIRT HYMNS
A hymnal to the country under our feet.
Born in a time of fire and darkness, grief, and loss, and then fragile, tender hope, the Red Dirt Hymns are songs of awe and praise, dedicated not to a god, but to the land.
Performed alongside two genre-defying instrumentalists, Harley Coleman (electric guitar), and Freya Schack-Arnott (cello), Red Dirt Hymns is a living songbook that spans art music, folk song, country ballad, and Aussie rock. Words by sixteen contemporary Australian writers (poets, essayists, and folksingers) and music by Andrew Ford unfolds to the evocative imagery of Sammy Hawker, whose art is created within the fabric of country itself: saltwater, limestone and eucalypt.
From Ellen van Neerven’s dark clouds to John Kinsella’s abundant gardens, Red Dirt Hymns does what a hymnal is meant to do: it draws us closer – to each other, and to the light and shade of our wide brown land.
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OF THE BODY
Drawing inspiration from Renaissance art, music, and science, each movement of Dan Walker’s song cycle Of The Body is devoted to an anatomical part: the eyes, the hands, the mouth, the feet, the blood, and finally, the heart. Paired with seldom heard stand-outs of the Renaissance repertoire and new arrangements of contemporary numbers like Devendra Banhart’s The Body Breaks, Of the Body traverses sex, the senses, and more, exploring our corporeal form in a distinctly contemporary context.
