KlangHaus
Norwich’s KlangHaus are a force to be reckoned with. Counting three sold out weeks at the Edinburgh Fringe, 41 sold out shows at London’s Royal Festival Hall and a sell out run in Colchester as well as rave reviews from The Guardian and The Times amongst their accolades, the innovation and creative spirit that runs apace through Norwich’s veins has never seemed more evident. Their immersive music theatre pieces change at every venue they play, adapting to their surroundings. This December they’ll be performing some extra special shows at The Shoe Factory Social right here in Norwich, and it’s going to be one of those performances that people talk about for years to come. I spoke to Karen Reilly, lead singer of The Neutrinos and KlangHaus about their journey so far, a locked safe in McDonalds and the amazing supportive team behind this incredible ongoing project.
How did you come up with the idea for KlangHaus?
It came from several different episodes of band activity.We decided to go to Berlin to record an album outside of our normal day to day lives, out of our comfort zone. Our budget didn’t stretch to include paying for a recording studio so we found a building that we could work in. We had just lost our drummer to a job relocation (we’re now working with the wonderful Jeron Gundersen), so we took another band with us, the duo BK and Dad and a bunch of artists and writers. We quickly became obsessed with the building, what it sounded like and ended up pretty much recording the building. It was a combination of marble corridors, huge wooden orchestral rehearsal rooms and tiny studios, where the former inhabitants had conducted wire-tapping and pushed out propaganda to the East from this, former East German radio station. The building was full of ghosts and we fed off that to make stuff up. We made an album called The Butcher of Common Sense. That was eight years ago and we have wanted to work with old buildings ever since, playing with their light and space. Our Berlin recordings came at the same time as we began questioning conventional gig formats and Late Night at The Museums hosted by the Sainsbury Centre and Norwich Castle started inviting us to play as a band in the gallery space, so we hid behind the walls and pumped sounds through the tannoy and again used the building as a playground. We also wanted to blow people away with the magic of a very close-up format.
The Neutrinos have been around for years now – when did the band first start up and what were your aims?
It’s true - we’ve been around for ever. I think at first we were pretty aimless, just wanted to share the thrill of live music. People who’ve been in bands know about the camaraderie, the fun, the thrills of those prestigious gigs in venues in London that make you feel part of the scene. We loved playing abroad, that was definitely an aim, to travel. New York and Toronto were our favourites and of course Berlin, and we’ve made lots of good friends with the music communities in places like Amsterdam and Ghent.
How did you first meet the artist Sal Pittman, your collaborator from Great Yarmouth?
Sal was a striking confident-looking goth with wild eye makeup - she used to stride up and down St Benedicts Street looking amazing. Somehow I got chatting to her about female singers at a house party and she mentioned the great avant-garde soprano Diamanda Galas. I’d never heard of her. A few days later I popped over to Sal’s flat. She looked surprised but sat me down next to the record player and I heard this wailing, screaming woman who scared the life out of me. I left Sal’s feeling pretty disturbed and we didn’t see each other again for at least five years. We next met when I was dressed up as Elaine Paige (don’t ask!). We got on swimmingly and we talked about art - eventually she did some crazy collage stuff for our website at the time, later moving on to doing some videos for the band. We asked her to come to Berlin to work on the thing that eventually became the Butcher of Common Sense project.
KlangHaus is a massively immersive project as each time you take it to a new location it’s completely reinvented. Do you have brainstorming sessions to discover potential new venues and then decide on the theme for that particular show?
We treat the venue/building like a band member, collaborator, a dirty friend, a surprise guest, a noisy child. It seems to be that we collectively and instinctively know when a venue feels great and this usually occurs when we visit, wander and chat about it afterwards.
I was at your first show at the abandoned McDonalds in the Westlegate Tower a few years back – that was a very spooky experience and certainly unnerved a lot of the audience. Were you intrigued to see people’s reactions that first time around?
Jon and Mark from the band just reminded me of when we got in there. It was really disgusting, with congealed McDonalds beef fat dripping from the ceiling onto the floor from a removed cooker extractor. The most frightening thing was the walk-in safe which we were thinking of using for the show - we were considering getting the audience to walk in and we would have closed the door when leaving. However, when we tried it in rehearsal, once shut, the door locked electronically never to open again. It frightened the life out of us as we were on the verge of getting real, live humans in there and of course, if we had, they’d still be there. It was great seeing people’s reactions - it confirmed our belief that people are interested in seeing buildings that most people don’t get the chance to see. Yes, people may have been a bit unnerved - that’s okay isn’t it? The audience didn’t know what was going to happen next.
Your first major show was KlangHaus at the Edinburgh Fringe in what used to be an animal hospital, and it got five star reviews across the board. How did it feel to get such a great reaction?
We were really surprised. We thought, as anybody who’s played in a band will know that quite often there’s one man and a dog in the audience and we thought that Edinburgh would be like that - we’d stand no chance with over 4,000 shows happening at the Fringe within the month. So when all the positive reviews came in it felt great. They also helped us understand the show we’d made better because the reviews were descriptive.
Most recently you’ve taken KlangHaus to Colchester Bus Depot, and sold out all 41 shows that you did in the roof space above the Royal Festival Hall. You couldn’t really get two more different places. Do you have a solid practical team to help you set up and realise your plans and dreams?
Yes we do and some of their faces are on the poster for KlangHaus: Four Storeys. Solid and practical are the perfect words to describe them. We’ve all grown and learned together how to do this thing called KlangHaus. Rosie Arnold has grown from lighting tech to executive producer. Alix Lingford has gone from production assistant to production manager. Alix was running the entire show by herself in London from week two after we accidentally broke Rosie! We also work with the wonderful Tim Tracey on lighting design. He works closely with Sal realising her vision and then we’ll find him in the rafters illuminating architectural features. Dr. Bill Vine helps design the brain behind the sound design, so we can throw sounds around the room. We have our press team, Steve Forster and Iain Lowery (I’m naming everyone because we all live in the same city and I highly recommend their services!). Then each host venue supplies tech help and ushers. We bumped into some of the Festival Hall ushers last week at a Hayward gallery exhibition they were working at. We hugged like family, it was poignant. We work hard at making the team feel valued and included - we totally need them.
You’re associate artists of NAC – how have they helped and supported you?
They have been and are brilliant. I think it’s really easy to become complacent about what happens in our local area, but here is a venue that goes the extra mile and is great at supporting local work. It was the director of NAC, Pasco, who suggested that we should take KlangHaus to Edinburgh. At the time, we thought Edinburgh is theatre and comedy but it really was the right thing at the right time.
The Neutrinos have always been quite an experimental band and like to approach music making in a unique and creative way. Would you say that you use music as a form of art, rather than pursuing some of the more traditional band goals of getting signed, touring or making a load of money and getting famous?
Firstly can we deal with the famous bit? I’d like to be well thought of within my field, but I think fame comes at too heavy a price these days, who wants to feel self conscious about going to the supermarket FFS? We love touring and aim to do loads more, our tours are more like month residencies where we only have to unpack our gear once a month and do 41 shows. Of course this is a total dream! Getting signed, hmmm, well we’ve had small record deals and several managers and it wasn’t much fun. It felt restrictive, but then I guess we have this need to try new ways of being in order to make ourselves and our audience feel something. I went to the art school as did Sal, I think we have convinced the other KlangHaus members that they too are artists as well as musicians.
Which other musical or artistic acts out there have inspired what KlangHaus have achieved so far?
De La Guarda Fuerzabruta in about 2003 blew my mind - it was the first time I had seen a theatrical show with performers flinging themselves around on ropes with rain falling on us all indoors, with a live band and where the performers grabbed the audience and included us all in the show. You know how your life is defined by moments? That was one for me - pure exhilaration.
You’ve had some amazing reviews and accolades from The Guardian amongst others, and you’ve been on tour around Europe in the past. What are your plans for the future?
We have just been booked for July 2017 back at the Southbank, a KlangHaus yet to be named that will grow out of the foundations laid by this year’s show, it wont be the same. We are playing in Luton in February, then booking a tour of residencies around the UK. We are in conversation about adventures in Albania and we want to play in Sydney behind the scenes at the OperaHaus!
You play very close to your audience and encourage an intimacy between you – does that mean you have to keep numbers small?
Yes, though we let the smallest space in the chosen building dictate the audience capacity. Ha ha, we ask the building! 30-50 usually works well. There is nothing like being close up and sometimes being off microphone, so the sound is one human to another, no mediating PA system, just your voice, the building acoustic and someone’s ears.
KlangHaus: Four Storeys is coming to St George’s Works right before Christmas. It’s an old shoe factory – do you write new songs for each site depending on the venue and its spiritual vibes and history? Have you got some songs about shoes and Christmas?
We write some new songs for each space and if we happen to have a song that will fit the space like our favourite No Xmas, well we are just gonna damn well play it! Ha ha. We all remember the building as a furniture depository, Hadley and Ottaway and a piano storage facility, so we are running with those themes, a piano house and a warehouse full of belongings and moving house themes of belonging, leaving, arriving. I’m currently collecting spooky dolls houses!
What do you want your hometown audience to get out of KlangHaus:Four Storeys?
We are looking forward to bringing the format of the KlangHaus show back to Norwich after all the ground work we did and continue to do here. All you patient people who have lived through our experiments our victories and our ’klangers’, we can’t wait to thrill you.
KlangHaus:Four Storeys will be at The Shoe Factory Social, St George’s Works on Muspole St
20th -23rd December at 18.30 and 20.30. 23rd December 6.30 only. Tickets available from norwichartscentre.co.uk
