Stephen O’Malley is an interesting character. That is if we overlook the intentional misspellings on his website and disregard the fact that he insists on living in France, a land, which he must have now recognised, is full of French people. Sunn 0))), peopled by O’Malley and Greg Anderson, is undeniably an influential band in the doom-metalosphere: They taught us that the ‘zero’ key on a traditional QWERTY keyboard can also be used to parenthesise words or phrases and this has in fact led to a revival in the use of the SHIFT key. People who had been typing the word ‘percent’ in long hand rediscovered the ‘SHIFT + 5’ combination and a whole subset of the population who depend on screaming most of what they say found ‘SHIFT + 1’ was a huge time-saver which afforded them a considerable decrease in capital letters per sentence. Musically Sunn is responsible for reintroducing hipsters, who had, for years, been caught up in a facetious disco revival, to the id-satisfaction of doom-metal.
Now Stephen O’Malley, with a different bedfellow in Peter Rehberg (PITA), is reintroducing the noise-listening community to country music. Their project KTL is nominally a doom-electronica band. They embody a fusion of Sunn’s droning low-end, strung-instrument feedback with the laptop-techno for which Peter Rehberg claims founding-father status. However, as was evident on the night, they derive their primary sound from O’Malley’s doom and drone while Rehberg is left to fill in the texture behind walls of feedback. The duo’s set began with an atmospheric country themed twang in the foreground. The kind of riff that is straight out of a nearly-independent, present-day, thriller-romance set in some dusty, red corner of the United States. A soundtrack to the feeling of being far from help while nothing was happening but that very soon, something terrible might.
It was an awfully quiet introduction to KTL for a crowd who had been primed for a brain-bashing by the offer of free earplugs at the bar. The women and children who had made good on that offer were, however, soon rewarded as the desert dissolved into a satanic, ear-seeking feedback missile. Surprisingly behind O’Malley’s manic assault on the bottom strings of his guitar Rehberg’s electronics became more noticeable. It was these complex textures which were the most rewarding for anybody who neglected the ear-plugs and was willing to meditate the white-noise into the background. As with other bands featuring laptop performers, KTL’s stage presence left much to be desired, but with the room filled by smoke and bathed in a brutal orange glow, nobody left the Bakery complaining about the atmosphere. KTL’s name is an abbreviation for ‘Kindertotenleider’ after a poem by Ruckert and a song by Gustav Mahler. Loosely translated it means “Songs about the death of children” and while this wasn’t, strictly speaking, child killing music, it was a guttural, atmospheric experience.
l3580
said ages ago