Kl(äus) is the future you were meant to hear
“All out the back here it was mostly residential,” says Kl(äus) member and proud synth-parent Stewart Lawler. “More than once we’ve been here and someone was having an orgasm.”
“Should’ve sampled it, but we were too busy being slightly horrified.”
Besides, glandular reality is a mess several planes below the intergalactic soundscape through which Kl(äus) travels. Their two albums sing with the space-dust tones of a warm and bright-eyed future, whose voyagers float on pulsations of wonderment and techno-optimism, from before Elon Musk ruined spaceships.
And inside Kl(äus)’ Mothership studio, draped with black-as-space curtains, humming with banks of machinery, backlit by stage-light primary colours, it’s easy to wonder, as you take in the techno-ethereal tones of the synth: is this the future we were meant to have?
Backward looking, forward thinking space sounds
“We’re backward looking but forward thinking,” Stewart says, on behalf of his bandmates Shane Pinnington and Jonathan Elliott, who may or may not be on their way to our interview. Backward to Berlin School ambience and a time before electronic music was synonymous with dance. And forward with the group’s willingness to combine weapons-grade instruments with up-to-date digital production.
“We’ll play on the latest stuff. It doesn’t have to be original or authentic or anything like that.”
There is a particular moment that Kl(äus) manages to conjure, with their string-synth melodies, dense-packed harmonic waves, their machine beeps and treble coruscations: this is the synapse between the Space Age and the digital world, with eyes to the stars, synthesisers everywhere, Dr Who on screens – and Kl(äus)’ future members meeting each other for the first time in a 1970s Hobart primary school.
All three were musical, and for decades Shane, Jonathan and Stewart remained in uneventful orbit around their love of Berlin School electronic band Tangerine Dream (mostly the 1979-1985 period). Then, 12 years ago, the potential energy became uncontainable:
“A mutual friend baited us to stop talking about it and just do it,” Stewart says. So Kl(äus) was born.
Tangerine Dreams meets misplaced umlauts
The name is an homage to Tangerine Dreams icon and later solo artist Klaus Schulze, one of the greats, whose manager, faced with waves of Schulze-derivatives, apocryphally declared “there are many imitators but there’s only one Klaus!”.
“So we adopted the name Kl(äus) – the band’s name is Kl(äus) but we have ‘Only One Klaus’ on the label,“ Stewart tells me.
Later Stewart, who handles the band’s graphic design, put brackets around the ‘aus’ since “we’re in Australia”. Then, taking cues from Motörhead, he added an umlaut over the ‘a’.
“I got told off by people who know what umlauts actually do in German. It looks good, that was the main point.”
The band’s first album, Kl(äus) came in 2016, with independent UK label Castles in Space. Kl(äus) 2 followed in 2020, and a third album is on the way. The creative process is simple:
“We just come here on a Sunday afternoon and drink beers,” Stewart says. “That’s why the third album has taken five years.”
The sum of synths and drum machines and sequencers
Stewart tells me his bandmates might still show up for the interview, since it’s a Sunday afternoon and they’ll probably be in for the jam. He checks his phone, not very hopefully, and then takes me on a tour of the gear.
On shelves and in cabinets, atop each other, on the floor, cloth-covered, wall-mounted are keyboards, a 1972 Farfisa organ machine, drum machines, offspring of the TR808, and a 1978 SH1 synth, Stewart’s very first electronic instrument, bought by his dad in 1979. None of it’s for show:
“So many electronic bands are just two guys with laptops or whatever. In the ‘70s or ‘80s people were actually playing the instruments, they were actually musicians.” Kl(äus) take the best of both worlds:
“I do a lot of the sequencing and laptop stuff,” Stewart says. “Jonathan is the one who plays the lines with two hands. Shane’s the one who puts the little noises on top – don’t tell him I told you that.”
These are “musicians with day jobs”, yet for all three Kl(äus) is just one of several musical projects: Jonathan is a classically trained pianist, Stewart has been a long-time member of electronic act Severed Heads. And yet:
“The stuff we’ve done [as Kl(āus)] didn’t feel like anything we’ve done alone.
“It’s greater than the sum of its parts.”