When the Neutrinos were at the Edinburgh fringe in 2014, their act was listed in the music section of the programme but that acclaimed production proved that a gig can triple up as immersive theatre and art installation too.
The group, consisting of Karen Reilly, Jon Baker, Mark Howe and Jeron Gundersen, are performing two very different shows, with an intimacy of experience seared through both. Klanghaus: InHaus is a variation on the 2014 show, where viewers were led from room to room, except now the audience is taken into one space, with various nooks. It looks like a messy studio has been put in the mixer with a domestic setting: sofas, scatter cushions and reading lamps sit alongside amplifiers, lines of mixing decks and screens with Sal Pittman’s visual projections.
“Sit anywhere you like,” we are told, as if we really are entering into someone’s home. The live music starts up and it is big, infectious and electronic – a rave in a living room. The band places itself within the audience so it feels like a performance going on within and around us. Spotlights shine on our faces too, and musicians weave between us, sometimes crawling on the floor or standing on the tables.
There is the sense of a jamboree when we are invited to produce a collective “hum”. It has the feel of a hippyish, 1970s-style singalong but is so playful that it could be ironic – a band member records it and says: “We’ll release it at Christmas.”
Where the show might have felt too arch or contrived as a whole, the tone remains genuine even while undermining a traditional concert in its form. An old phone trills and we are asked: “Are you having a good time?” It is only when this ubiquitous “live concert” question is asked that the playfulness feels artful.
The band takes us from the electronica to poetry and blasts of rock or punk (thank God for the ear-defenders around the room), and it seems like a gig shifting unpredictably beneath our feet.
Klanghaus: Darkroom takes place in the same room, with the same bric-a-brac, but it is a very different proposition, performed to the audience one by one. We are led in singly to a comfy sofa and the lights are promptly switched off to pitch blackness (the group tell me afterward it was a challenge to render the space entirely dark).
A live soundtrack accompanies 20 minutes of darkness which takes us into a soundscape loosely, non-didactically, related to climate crisis. Conceived in collaboration with the Scottish community of climate experts at The Barn, Aberdeenshire, and scientists at University of East Anglia’s Tyndall Centre, it was first presented at Glasgow’s Cop26 UN climate change conference.
The birdsong at the beginning sends me back to the pandemic. It is followed by a kind of associative soundtrack (from the rumble of ocean waves to the thunder of what sounds like a motorway) that switches from quiet ambience to sudden clashes and metal-like sounds that contain danger: there is a rumble so great, so throttling, that it seems to inhabit the room, taking monstrous form in the dark.
There is reflection time afterwards and contact with the Neutrinos. It is all highly personal, innovative and experimental, capturing the spirit of the fringe festival entirely.
• At Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 27 August
