Royal Festival Hall, London
By Sabina Dewfield
Klanghaus: On Air, from the experimental art-rock band The Neutrinos and installation light artist Sal Pittman, is a complete reimagining of ‘the gig’: a diverse set transitioning between cool funk, heavy rock and acoustic guitar, accompanied by perfectly timed image projections. It was seamlessly staged in the dark arteries of the Royal Festival Hall.
We – an audience of around twenty – were ushered through the corners of three distinct spaces, starting with small concrete partitioned rooms, where a screen showed rising bubbles and a looped video of wide-eyed faces, later revealed to be those of the band, submerged in water. Meanwhile, a shadow behind the screen played a wobble board and what looked like a guitar standing on its end. We moved on, and a figure emerged from the shadows with a microphone, joined by her bandmates. The song was loud and upbeat – we had been provided with earplugs – and there were moments where the hot lighting and in-your-face performance became cloyingly claustrophobic. The next space was thankfully larger: an industrial room dotted with vents, control panels and spiralling curated projections. The majority of the set took place in various corners of this room but, eventually, the windowless chambers opened up onto the roof where we could hear the repeated strains of the last song, ‘On Air’, wafting up through the air vents by our ankles.
Not all the songs, especially the heavier rock-inspired numbers, were memorable, and some of the lyrics lacked originality. As a whole, however, the event had a strong sense of theatricality and the songs were a contextual vehicle for something much more interesting: a new spin on the traditional concert format. 