Sound And Vision

Photo courtesy of Remote Control

KTL isn’t the sort of music you play to children. It’s music for nightmares. The German phrase it abbreviates—Kindertotenlieder—translates as ‘songs of the death of children’, so you see where this thing could lead. As an exploration of the space between light and dark, it’s highly atmospheric and much of the time startlingly elegant. KTL is Steven O’Malley (SunnO))), Khanate) and Austrian-based experimental musician Peter Rehberg. Steven is into amps and guitars while Peter handles the digital side of things. The duo evolved while composing pieces for the theatre production of Kindertotenlieder, which centres on the funeral of a murder victim who returns as a ghost. In keeping with the theme, the lads recorded in a former abattoir, resistance fortress, and, why not—a 16th century manor. Peter, who infamously had a plate thrown at him during a recent DJ set, called up from France to chat about the project. Vice: How did you come to work with Steven? Peter: I’d kind of known him through Sunn0))). I did a couple of shows with them when they played in Austria and we just stayed in touch. Last year Gisele [theatre director] was looking for a new group to be in her piece and she had the idea of Steven and me. He’s very sweet. We understand each other’s way of doing things. Of course we have different ways of approaching things but there’s no friction, it’s all positive. Does this music creep you out? Not really. There is a certain atmosphere to it. Do you think it’s misunderstood? There’s lots of clichés involved, which get built up. Sometimes it’s a good thing and you can thrive off that—sometimes it has a negative impact. Most press just put everything in little boxes. The smoke machine overload probably doesn’t help. Steven’s quite a virtuoso on that machine. We wanted to have simple and stark light, and the smoke to wipe everyone out. When I play on my own I have very simple backlights or no lights. I’m into the way things look but at the same time I’m into very simple lights, which annoys some lighting technicians cos they like to show off what they’ve got. How different is KTL from the stuff you normally do? When I work on my own it’s much noisier, more extreme. We recorded it in blocks, recorded all the guitar tracks then I added my electronic parts. We spent a couple of days editing and then once we were doing the theatre pieces we actually learnt to play the tracks. There’s a structure to each of the tracks but we have parts where we drift off and points where we meet up and go on to the next thing. Do you get to the theatre much? I was very interested in the 80s because one of my favourite artists was Bruce Gilbert from the group Wire. He released an album called This Way, which was music he did for the British choreographer Michael Clark. I just got into this idea of really weird abstract music performed in theatres, which I always thought of as being some high culture place. I started to be asked by certain choreographers to do music and it became a parallel universe to my solo stuff. Do you feel a sense of responsibility for the music once it’s out there? No. I like the idea of things like that. That’s more or less what I was interested in when I got into music—things which stuck out and were a bit jagged. Not wilfully experimental, but, ‘that’s a bit odd.’ TROY DEE COLVIN
KTL—self titled and KTL—2 are out now through Stomp