“I had been playing guitar in a few bands and recording my own material under different guises for a few years before I started making music as The KVB,” Wood explains. “All the music we have released so far has been recorded by ourselves at our home studio.”
The name KVB is an abbreviation of Klaus Van Barrel, an alias suggested by a friend of Wood when he started creating his own music. “It’s an alias my friend and I created when we started making music together,” Wood explains. “We wanted it to sound slightly absurd.” In the beginning Wood says there wasn’t a particular musical idea that was flowing through his head: it was about experimentation and exploration. “There wasn’t a plan as such,” Wood says. “It’s more a combination of both musical and non-musical influences, and the mood and instruments that are available to me. I think there is something really beautiful about the texture our old 16 tracks creates.”
After committing various musical ideas to recorded form, Wood invited Kat Day to join the band on keyboards and synthesiser. It was to be the beginning of the transformation of The KVB from pet studio project to living, breathing and live performing creature. The KVB played its first live show in 2011, a couple of years after Wood had started his fledgling project. Wood is still mining his early studio recordings for The KVB releases, including The KVB’s most recent release, the mini-album Minus One. “I have written a lot in the past three years and still have a lot of recorded unreleased works that haven’t been played live,” Wood says.
Day’s involvement in the band also introduced the striking visual background imagery now intrinsic to The KVB’s live show. “Kat brought in the visual aspect of the band’s live performance,” Wood says. “The KVB did not play live before Kat joined. Now we consider [the visual imagery] a key part of our performance – it heightens the immersive atmosphere we wish our audiences to experience”.
Wood says The KVB’s live imagery “fluctuates between quite seductive, slow 3D rendered tactile images and flicker-film-esque, digital glitch based works”. The overall objective is to establish a connection between the music and the imagery displayed. “I am really interested in the haptic and how the brain can create a conscious connection to the screen to really ‘feel’, stroke and be immersed in the imagery,” Wood says. In this context, there is, Wood says, a symbiotic relationship between the music that’s played and the colours and textures displayed. “Both components relate in the intent of the affect,” Wood says. “The textured synths mirror the slower, immersive imagery and almost ‘lulls’ the audience, whereas, the aggressive guitars mirror the glitch, which are quite jarring and simulate the affect of flicker film on the audiences’ perception of consciousness.”
This month, The KVB will make its first trip to Australia as guests of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, having come to the attention of the BJM’s L’enfant terrible genius, Anton Newcombe earlier this year. “We met Anton through our manager Dr Kiko, who played our last LP Immaterial Visions to him whilst we were in Berlin early this year,” Wood explains. The relationship between Newcombe and The KVB is more than a temporary marriage of convenience, with Wood and Day planning to head to Newcombe’s studio next year to transform more of Wood’s original material into rich KVB product. “I’ve still got lots of material I’ve already recorded,” Wood says. “Hopefully they will also get rereleased in the future, although we have been recording some new songs at Anton’s studio in Berlin, which should be out sometime next year.”
BY PATRICK EMERY
