Ahead of the premiere of Love Light Norwich 2022, we caught up with the arts collective, KlangHaus, who are exhibiting their latest installation for the festival in Norwich School’s Blake Studio.

KlangHaus are an arts collective combining art-rock mavericks The Neutrinos (Karen Reilly and Mark Howe) and the richly inventive work of visual artist Sal Pittman. Returning to Love Light Norwich after last year’s sell-out FloodLight show, KlangHaus have created a brand-new journey through saturated colour, pitch darkness and blinding light.

LightHaus is a free, 15-minute immersive experience for family audiences, music fans, the curious and unsuspecting; an intense performance for sound and senses made from music, natural sounds, light and projections.

 

Can you tell us a bit about how KlangHaus began?

Karen: It kind of emerged. We as a band worked with Sal in a visual capacity and we decided to record an album in Berlin because we’d played there and it felt really exciting. So we did that and took a gang of people with us: a film maker, technician, a writer and another band and we just went out there and explored this building. We couldn’t afford a studio so we just found a building to work it, and it turned out to be a thousand room ex DDR radio station and we started recording the building, visually and sonically.

Sal: We came back with piles and piles of images, sound, the works, and we ended up turning it into an art book of the journey of how Klanghaus happened. We finally premiered that in 2012, so it’s actually lovely because we are now in our tenth year in terms of it becoming what it was.

Mark: People describe the show as a bit like being in a book or in a film. The main thing that I think going to Berlin showed us was that we are interested in buildings. Music, art, it happens in spaces, everything happens in spaces. I think we just really got fed up with ‘rocking’ and just wanted to make work where we were connecting with people really, and buildings do that – people love going into buildings, even a building like [the Blake Studio], which people know really well, particularly the pupils, and transforming it.

 

So what should people expect when they come in here for the show?

Karen: Kind of three spaces, and you move through them and we start a narrative around lighthouses and hope. Then they will move into an area and they will be bathed in coluor and sound, darkness, and then there’s a little surprise…

Mark: …or a big surprise – depending on how you look at it! A lot of the work we do has multiple narratives. People make their own stories up, they have their own show really. With something like this, which is family orientated, there’s a little bit of fun, there’s some laughter and there’s some scary moments and a sense of being looked after. It’s a very brief show, it’s 15 minutes, and one of the things we like to do at the end is ask people ‘how long was it?’ because for some people time stretches enormously and for others it’s over way too quickly.

 

What’s the inspiration behind the show? We’ve mentioned lighthouses, oceans – where’s that come from?

Sal: I suppose it’s a response to Dark Room, which [KlangHaus] did in lockdown. I’m based in London so it wasn’t possible for me to be there. But the flip side of that is that LightHaus is a response to Dark Room and also wanting to develop a thing where we can really saturate people for a long time, which we do anyway in the shows, but to have something we can move around is a really nice thing.

Mark:  With this we just wanted to get more people through. So the inspiration really was the nature of a light festival itself, and there are light festivals all over the country, all over the world in fact, so from a strategic point of view, and a business point of view, it’s like, okay, well we can get a show up and running and we can take it anywhere and we can run it for a week. We’re really fortunate to have Norwich as a place to work for us and to develop new ideas.

 

So is LightHaus pretty typical of KlangHaus work?

Mark: Yes, most of our KlangHaus work is a cross between an installation, a gig, an art exhibition, so yes, really mixing up the different forms.

Karen: We make a little world for people to come into. We just got bored of playing gigs. The format is so conservative and yet the music quite often is groundbreaking!

 

How did you come to be involved with Love Light Norwich?

Karen: Alex Rinsler was the producer of Love Light in its first incarnation, and he didn’t know anybody in Norwich, so he was looking at different websites and talking to the Norwich network and they said ‘oh you should talk to Klanghaus’. He said ‘can I meet you?’ and I said ‘okay, you can meet me, but that night I’m on a coach going to Cley to see an exhibition. If you want to meet me, get on the coach’. And he did! So he came up to Cley, so it was quite a long coach journey, met loads of artists and then we took him back to the Playhouse bar, he met loads more artists and he didn’t really have to do much more work!

 

How have you found it exhibiting in Norwich School and using this space?

Karen: It’s been good! Quite often one of the most challenging things is building a relationship, not just with the building, but with the people who are working in the building, using the building, that own the building. Staff here have been incredible!

Mark: Also, we have a tendency to use buildings that haven’t got the infrastructure quite often, they’re just shells or they’ve been abandoned. So this is a bit of a departure for us, working with stuff that’s already here and then building our own room inside.

 

Finally, is there anything more you’d say to anyone thinking of coming?

Mark: I’d say if it sounds interesting then give it a go! I think we’re really interested in people’s responses so give it a try, push the boat out.

Karen: Nice, a lighthouse reference!

Mark: Something like that!

 

LightHaus is happening at the Blake Studio on the 17 and 19 Feb, with multiple performances between 4.30pm and 8.50pm. Find out more here.