Game of Tones

"Music is really rebellious," says Karen Reilly, speaking like a true iconoclast. "Why know what format you’re going to get? It’s conservative. We went to Berlin to record an album and got really taken in by the building we played in. How could we harvest the sounds from the rooms?" This was the conceptual birthplace of KlangHaus, which sees Reilly's band The Neutrinos run with the idea of a performance space to transform it into a fully immersive, sonorous experience in which the electro-rock band is up close and personal with the audience.

"We did some tests for KlangHaus in our own house where we did a show in complete darkness" (audiences should be prepared for this in the show, too). "Playing in complete blackness meant that we didn’t have to ‘perform’ and anyone watching didn’t have to be part of ‘an audience’. We just had to play."

But when the lights come up, it gives the group a chance to showcase the piece's visual identity. "What really pisses me off about gigs today is the flashiness. I just want my eyes to be lit up," explains Reilly. To this end, the band have employed the talents of graphic artist Sal Pittman, who bathes the room in colour using slides and bars of cut-up paper. The intended effect, Reilly explains, is that "when people come in we want to create another world that they can just be in. We try to leave enough visual and aural space without bombarding you."

It appears to be as inquisitive and tonally sensitive an experiment as Ensemble musikFabrik’s Delusion of the Fury at the Edinburgh International Festival, though on a smaller scale. This more epic music-theatre piece, jostling with the rituals and rites taken from Japanese Noh and Ethiopian myth, plunges us into the work of American composer Harry Partch. Director Heiner Goebbels leads us on a percussive and sensory journey, which recreates idiosyncratic instruments full of chimes and clonks that were actually designed by Partch himself.

Both shows modify how we absorb sounds and images – even to the point of disorientation. In KlangHaus, Reilly explains that she wants the audience "to be taken down into different levels of consciousness." The sonic layering of the piece hints at a scientific examination of the way we process the world around us, and Reilly has even gone as far as to experiment with how extracting certain frequencies alters the way we hear.

This teasing around the way audiences witness their shows is what ultimately fascinates Reilly and her band – and what may also lead to a potentially transformative music-theatre synthesis. But The Neutrinos aren't so carried away by these ideas that they forget the more straightforward pleasures of group singing. Reilly admits that "we've done shows in intimate spaces before and there's nothing like feeling the vibration of other people, especially on harmonies. It’s just exhilarating."