Judith Wright Centre - Fri Sep 21

After punishing his guitar in a free-form explosion of noise, Yusuke Akai leaps up to encircle the room and let out a rabid howl. Other players outside the room thump out jungle beats and unseen instruments viciously vie for attention. Eventually Yusuke leaves the room completely and we’re left listening to this wonderful cacophony happening in the hall.

In Danny Boyle’s recent film Sunshine, as the characters travel in a spaceship closer to our sun, some become indefinably mesmerized by this giant power, and they willingly look at its light with diminishing levels of filtering. It’s something about looking directly at the sun, so overwhelming our sense of sight, that makes us feel we’re experiencing something akin to our pure sense of light. This, I believe, is the endeavour of KTL (Stephen O’Malley from Sunn O))), Peter Rehberg aka PITA) – to so envelope the audience in sound that the experience reaches toward a kind of purity not available in the familiar sustain-and-release of pop music or, in fact, melody itself. Reaching toward but not attaining this unattainable sense of pure sound is not to be seen as a failure – just as looking at the sun will blind a person long before they experience a pure sense of light – but this struggle forms the intellectual engagement KTL have with their audience. This engagement, however, is only a tiny fraction of the sublime, wholly ephemeral experience of such a sound deluge – when it whistles away, its absence seems louder than its presence, and the return to the world of separate and unconnected sounds and voices feels like a crushing reappearance of gravity. I wanted to reach out and hold onto this drunken feeling, I wanted to exist in the realm of purity, I wanted to understand how things of utter awe can make one whisper, “The horror... the horror...”

PAUL RANKIN

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