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LAST HAUS on EARTH

A sequel of sorts to InHaus. We start on Earth preparing to leave the Last Haus perhaps to return? From the Space Station, we drift through the silence, looking down, up, through, and around , smelling the hot metallics and damp must and concrete all the while driving through impossible time signatures and landing on Mars for a day. Dec 2024 –

DARKROOM | InHAUS

The shows exist as a dual experience, encouraging audience from one show to attend another, each in service to the other.  They complement one another in their themes of climate change, cataclysm, and community.

We took them to the Edinburgh Fringe together. Edinburgh Festival Fringe –

August 2023. 3 weeks.

DARKROOM

Is a totally engulfing sound installation, delivered live to an audience of one. Experiential and immersive, it is a singular journey, an introspective meditation through the nervous system and a visceral response to climate change.

‘Free from empty rhetoric, this performance sinks its nails deep into our consciousness, clawing back the attention that the current climate emergency demands.’ Everything Theatre *****

photos ©SalPittman

InHAUS

Begins like a live gig in a front room. It is a hypnotic, cinematic, enveloping and heartfelt welcome to the last house standing on Earth, a journey that begins in domestic setting of our real home through to a near future metropolis into the deep sea and on into space, a shelter that invites the audience to make themselves at home with KlangHaus.

A love song to togetherness, the audience emerge galvanised and transformed.

photos ©SalPittman

InHaus

(research and development)

Photos ©Gordon Woolcock and SalPittman

‘There’s a ghost in my eyes, looking out for you….’ musical saws whine, the double bass happily rattles our bones….we go downstairs…. are we in a radio? John Peel’s voice amongst the whirring airwaves….. Christmas families dance beyond the windows, luminous colour and light permeate the walls, a film of the sea surges into the most ominous swell pulling us under water.

Lulled into Out To Sea, the audience settle in, find their bearings. A giant spring in the ceiling is a space ray…Then it’s mighty loud, but the room allows clarity of sound….sometimes the band are so loud but we can sing off-mic…quiet and loud… and so much detail, are we in the last remaining house…..?

The show contained 12 songs including, You Can’t Hum Your Way Out of This One, Ghost and Love is in the Bullet and a multi channel film series made to maximise spatial and scale perception using macro and microcosmic journeys within the domestic settings and installations.

KlangHaus – InHaus Dec 28th – Dec 31st 2022

Photos ©Gordon Woolcock and SalPittman

800 Breaths

Royal Festival Hall. Southbank Centre – July 2017.  3 week show run. 

In the space within the roof – KlangHaus made a return visit . . .

800 human breaths was the average amount taken for the length of the show. The auditorium of the Festival hall is based on an egg in a box. so it technically floats to avoid acoustic interference.  These were the starting points of the show’s concept, researching assisted breathing and artificial life.

The show contained 12 songs including, Graphene Queen, Pulse Addict, and Who’s Counting and a multi channel film series derived from the show research including found footage of early 20th century physics experimentation on electricity, sound waves, flight simulators and breathing apparatus alongside original footage and super-graphic slide projection installation works

Four Storeys.

St Georges Works, Norwich – December 2016

A former furniture depository – the show centred around a sense of place, being uprooted and displacement…….what is the meaning of home?

Installed across a 4 storey warehouse including a forest and a tree den, sinking ghost furniture, abandoned island shelters and an impenetrable room with multiple doors.

The show contained 12 songs including Family Circle, Clump, and Turning In and a film series woven into site responsive installations which focused on – transience, displacement and a sense of place and home alongside super-graphic slide projections to rescale and reframe the rooms.

Alight Here.

Queen St Bus Depot. Colchester – September 2016.  1 week show run.

A former bus depot with warrens and cavernous spaces under one battered roof. With all of Colchester’s pigeons for company we looked at itinerant movement and municipal graffiti, phantom buses and lost property, we had a room ‘on fire,’ singing inspection pits, a gig on uncle Tony’s bus and an 19th century escapologist that we found in the building’s psycho-geography – it had been a theatre that had succumbed to a fire in the early 20th century . . .

The show’s concept was based on these histories of the building and the politics of public transport alongside narratives linked to the Victorian Theatre Royal that formed the foundations of the depot.

The show contained 12 songs including Sitting on a Little World, Swing Ain’t Right, and Blocked By Stars with super-graphic slide and site responsive installations throughout, overhead projection, and a multi channel film series underpinned by the concept and narratives above.

On Air

Royal Festival Hall. Southbank Centre – July 2016.  3 week show run. The show was part of the SouthBank’s Festival of Love.

A deep dive research into the history of the festival hall: Its build, its origins and psycho-geography formed the basis of being On Air – as human, as radio, as passage, as architecture, as metaphor.

The concept of the show evolved out of the Thames-side location and architectural innovation of RFH including material drawn directly from personal interviews with Jean Symons ( the only woman working onsite during the construction of RFH in 1950/51)

The show contained 12 songs including Sonic Police, Gills n Buoys, and On Air. The multiple films had themes of awakening, elevation and resuscitation alongside super-graphic slides made from abstractions of iconic views along the South Bank of the Thames.

Lowerground

Somerset House – June 2015 . A two week research and development residency. 

We bought the architecture into the ex-inland revenue offices. There was space to play with shallow depths of field and illusion, hidden histories, hidden song, sound and film. Intense tungsten colour alongside internal rooms that were completely light-proof . . allowed us to research the extremes of light and dark, extremes of loud and silent.

KlangHaus at The Small Animal Hospital

Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Summerhall – August 2014.

As the old veterinary school closed and became part of the Summerhall performance venues.

The school was frozen in a moment of departure. Palpable ghosts of the small animals. We walked within the spaces and multiple rooms that included lifts, metallic tunnels, cages for animals in post-anaesthesia, white boards complete with un-erased pets names, plan chests with dynamo tape declaring their medical contents, internal windows and offices and a staircase to the sky. The show’s concept was inspired by consciousness and anaesthesia, confinement and freedom.

The small animal hospital gave us the space to develop our promenade performances, sensory site responses and our manifesto.

The show included 12 songs including Song of the Small Animals, Mother’s Mother Tongue and Brothers In Milk and a series of films, animations, sculpture and hand-crafted super-graphic slide installations devised from the historic and profuse content of the building.

photos by Jonathan Blackford, Paul Blakemore and the members of KlangHaus . . . .

The Butcher of Common Sense at The Undercroft.

Undercroft, Norwich – winter 2012

Large scale light projection series. These are the original pieces that have evolved into the kinetic slide art that we use collaged with film and installations in KlangHaus. We use rare 15mm lenses to create enormous super-graphic backdrops.

The Butcher of Common Sense. Norwich Launch.

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Go Have Fun

A film of the song inspired by the inauguration of Barack Obama into the White House in 2008.

The stop motion stills were taken  in the Funkhaus Nalepastrasse  Berlin.

This was part of our 10 day residency for the Butcher of Common Sense

The mothership of KlangHaus.

Butcher of Common Sense – Book Film

An art book, an album, an exhibition; produced from the mammoth amount of material we gathered from the residency.

Created over a 2 year period. Drawing on Da Da and Fluxus techniques. Hand printed by the butcher women. released in 2012.

The book is a manifestation of the creative process instigated by a gang of 9 artists, the nature of resistance and psycho-geography. A colossal, historic, breathtaking building and the liminal space.

The Butcher of Common Sense led The Neutrinos and Sal Pittman to create KlangHaus