In this open-ended series we shine a light into the crucible of new music creation today, revealing exhilarating cross-currents in sound and style through boundary-breaking, visceral performances.
From contemporary orchestral composition to shimmering electronic sound worlds, musical expression is becoming less defined by genre, more framed by its emotional and cultural contexts. Luminate taps into this bold, exploratory landscape in a series of shows that will provoke and inspire.
We are delighted to welcome back one of our favourite ensembles, Ex-Easter Island Head, to curate a show for our fourth season of Luminate. The genre-defying 'mallet guitar' ensemble helped launch Luminate back in 2018, and are returning in expanded quartet form to premiere new material from their forthcoming album. They have chosen two remarkable artists, Kelly Jayne Jones and Thomas Stone to join them.
Dressed for the closing night of the original Dadaist nightclub Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, they sound like they are playing jazz at the end of the world’s end. They are like nothing else. Challenging, morphing, eclectic, ethereal – engaging.
Listed by NPR as one of the Top 100 Young Composers of today, Pakistani singer Arooj Aftab carries in her music a seasoned tranquility that inspires calm to whoever listens.
With their slow-stepping, spacious urban dubscapes, Space Afrika harnesses ambient, Detroit techno and shades of early nineties Sheffield with a fresh and open approach to composition — this is dub techno stripped-down, sealed in a time capsule and sent back from the near future. Friends for almost two decades, the two Joshua's formed Space Afrika after years of listening to music together, sequestered by harsh Northern winters. Heavily inspired by the industrial architecture of Northwest England and notions of travel, their sonic framework evokes images of rust and disintegrating concrete, and sensations of movement and redemption — exuding a distorted analogue soul offering escape into their overcast skies.
Pop polymath Lafawndah presents her latest album, The Fifth Season, joined by a cast assembled from some of London's most exciting musicians
Operating on a plane between avant-garde indie, bubbling electronica and cosmic psychedelia, London group Voka Gentle have an addictive, amorphous sound.
Mark Simpson makes his Luminate debut in a new collaboration with Oliver Coates, featuring a first half of world premiere performances followed by a second half of free form improvisation.
Laura Cannell is joined by Kate Ellis and Stewart Lee to perform live soundtracks to newly-commissioned films, intertwining imagery, spoken word and song conjuring real and fictional landscapes & folklore from their album These Feral