Thirty voices from Oulu sing back to radio light from distant galaxies in the world premiere of Andrew Melchior’s The Lumen at Oulu Cathedral on Lumo Saturday, 21 November 2026
OULU, FINLAND, 1 November 2026. On the Saturday night of this year’s Lumo Light Festival, Oulu Cathedral will hold the world premiere of The Lumen, a new work by composer and artist Andrew Melchior in which a choir of thirty voices answers flashes of radio light that left distant galaxies billions of years ago. The performance begins at 22.15 on Saturday 21 November and admission is free.
Since Easter, Melchior’s installation The Logos has filled the cathedral with fast radio bursts: pulses of radio energy lasting a few thousandths of a second, arriving from far beyond our own galaxy. The work draws on the entire second CHIME/FRB catalogue, 4,539 bursts from 3,641 sources caught by the CHIME telescope in British Columbia between 2018 and 2023, shared with Melchior by physicist Kiyoshi Masui of the MIT Kavli Institute. Each burst reaches Earth with its high frequencies first and its low frequencies trailing behind, stretched by its journey through intergalactic gas. Through FRBSynth, an instrument built by Oliver Larkin, and twelve Genelec loudspeakers, every one of them becomes a sweep of sound falling from the cupola into the nave.
The Lumen is the final chapter of The Logos in Oulu, and the first time human voices have joined it. The Tuira Chamber Choir, singing in Oulu since 1969, performs in Finnish under its artistic director and conductor, Satu Korpi. Rather than standing on the chancel, the singers stand among the audience, in two groups facing each other across a single candle beneath the dome, while Melchior plays the bursts live from a keyboard. Over fifteen minutes the voices move from a shimmering hum in the tradition of Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna, through a gathering storm and ten seconds of complete silence, into the stillness of Arvo Pärt.
The text is short and plain. It opens with a single word, Kuule, listen, and closes with another, Valo, light, sung by one soprano alone. At its heart is Ikuinen valo, eternal light: the Finnish for the lux aeterna of the old Latin Requiem, the same words Ligeti set in 1966. The cathedral itself is part of the score. A sound in Oulu Cathedral hangs in the air for seven seconds, so every voice and every burst leaves a long shadow behind it.
The thinking behind The Logos comes from the philosopher Timothy Morton of Rice University, whose idea of the hyperobject describes things so vast in time and space that we only ever meet a fragment of them. A fast radio burst is exactly that: a sliver of an event that began before the Earth had formed, arriving now, for a moment, in a church in northern Finland. From the start the work has also been shaped by Satu Saarinen, Dean of Oulu Cathedral, who has championed it as a meeting point between science, art and faith.
“Since Easter the cathedral has been listening to the sky on its own,” says Andrew Melchior. “I wanted the last word of The Logos in Oulu to be an answer, and that answer had to come
from Oulu itself: in Finnish, from a choir that’s been singing in this city for more than fifty years, standing among the people who’ve come to listen. The Lumen is my thank you to everyone who’s walked into this cathedral this year.”
Because the music depends on the cathedral’s silence, the doors will close once the performance begins. Visitors are asked to arrive in good time. Everyone will receive a card with the full text in Finnish and English to take home.
After Oulu, Melchior plans for The Logos to travel on to other sacred spaces in Europe, each time answered by voices from its own city.
Credits
Composition, spatial design and live bursts: Andrew Melchior
Choir: Tuira Chamber Choir (Tuiran kamarikuoro)Artistic director and conductor: Satu Korpi
Fast radio burst data: CHIME/FRB Collaboration, with thanks to Kiyoshi Masui, MIT
Kavli Institute
Philosophical frame: Timothy Morton, Rice University
FRBSynth instrument: Oliver Larkin
Loudspeaker system: Genelec
Photography: Anne Lygnegård
For more information
Andrew Melchior
andrew@sonicamber.com
Interviews, photographs by Anne Lygnegård and audio are available on request.
