KLANGHAUS: DARK ROOM and LAST HAUS ON EARTH
The stuff of festivals, weird and wonderful, challenging and charming too, and a form that can so easily go so very wrong… Not with Klanghaus at the helm. Playing throughout the festival there are plenty of opportunities to experience this intimate and extraordinary performance, and to describe in a review exactly what this is would certainly be doing it a disservice. Dark Room will be what you make of it, it is stirring, thought provoking, memory jogging, intense, surprising and for me it was comforting. It may take you outside your comfort zone perhaps but in their hands it is never uncomfortable, you feel cared for and safe. At around 30 minutes it is as I said at the start, the stuff of festivals and for that I applaud them and the festival.
Later the same day I returned to experience their second work for the festival. Last Haus On Earth takes places in the same confined space but this time with a larger audience, an audience invited to be come fully involved, encouraged to dance, move about and even take photographs! And we did, carried along on a wave of energy, multi-media mayhem and a band delivering a complex and simultaneously simple musical landscape. This is a genuinely immersive experience, you are not watching a band play, you are on the platform in and amongst them, feeding on their energy as they dash around you, sometimes at speed sometimes drifting or loping in the half light. It’s not a gig, it’s not a play, it’s not like anything I have experienced before, save for playing in bands as a student. And in that it has the same exhilaration, that empowering sense of being a part of something that you can’t quite explain. The whole takes place in a clutter of twentieth century furnishings and ephemera, a random mess of a space with startling projections that lurch between calming and distressing, at moments upsetting, is this a post apocalyptic world, and then soothing and natural, sub aquatic space. And musically we get the same contrasts, thrashing post punk energy taking me right back to my late teens seeing bands like The Clash and The Sex Pistols play live, then delicate un-amplified folk like harmonies.
The musicianship is skilful, great playing from them all and excellent vocals too, in particular from Karen Reilly who has the energy of a Patti Smith or Grace Slick in one moment and then the lyric sweetness of a Sandy Denny next.
The total hour long experience is like being invited to be part of a band and enjoy that, for so many of us the fantasy of playing on stage with a great band for a huge audience. But we are not a huge audience, we are less than twenty people, of all ages, from kids to people like me, 70 and older, and the only sadness I felt was that our applause, whist enthusiastic, did not in volume reflect the fun we seemed to collectively be having. Today I am listening to the album, The Neutrinos, and enjoying in more depth the lyrics. Definitely one to catch if you can get a ticket.
Andrew Kay
3 May
Anita’s Room, Brighton Dome
Rating:
