The Neutrinos & Sal Pittman: Klanghaus

klanghausIt happens on occasion at this festival, which presents such a wide and variable spectrum of art, that one comes across a show that stubbornly refuses to be put into a category. There are shows that avoid definition by genre, and sometimes even make it difficult to describe them as either good or bad: they are an experience, they happen to you, and that is all the quantification they need. Klanghaus is one of these. So with that in mind, this review aims to relay that experience as faithfully as possible.

Devised as a collaboration between ‘noise-artists’ The Neutrinos and Sal Pittman, Klanghaus deconstructs the live music experience and mixes it with visual art, projection and immersive surroundings. It starts with a journey in a small lift up to Summerhall’s Small Animal Hospital, a maze of winding corridors and small claustrophobic rooms, the walls lined with cages and medical paraphernalia.

We are left there to wander through the halls, past images of black and white birds escaping through iron bars, through examination rooms doused in the startling light of projectors throwing shifting colours on to the walls. Everything is eerie, unsettling, unstable. I find myself checking the dark corners of the rooms, searching for some suspected horror. All the while there is a clamour echoing down the corridor, the sound of growling bass and the the sharp clatter of metal being struck with sticks, some unseen doom drawing us closer.

And it’s at the source of the noise that we find the band, shut in the cages, making imposing noise. They lead the audience through a series of rooms, large and small, menacing and welcoming. In each they perform a piece of music or sound, it wanders through shades of industrial punk, metal, tones of David Bowie, Lou Reed, Tom Waits amongst a plethora of other influences. But there is always something strange happening, musicians playing unseen or in peculiar places, that keeps the audience fascinated as to where they are or what is coming next. Their style of performance is also very engaging, it’s direct and provocative and odd, and it adds to the eerie atmosphere.

The piece conjures up themes of incarceration, of torture, of animal testing, and, most effectively, of mental illness. We feel we are walking through the themes, immersed in them, we understand them not through an academic analysis or through language, we feel them in our bones. And by the last song, ‘a song for the small animals,’ I found the journey to be quite moving, a tender song that contrasts with the sonic aggression that has preceded it.

It was something quite unique, an experience, infringing on something undefinable, and I’m exceptionally pleased to have undertaken the journey. It’s an assault on the mind. If you’re phobic of small places or of loud noises it’s perhaps best avoided. If you are looking for comfort, for narrative or something familiar it might not be for you. But for the adventurers it is perfect, I would certainly encourage you to experience it for yourself.