Clair Brothers reinforces touring aural experience
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Hoff comments: “Our show invites listeners to re-imagine the world through their ears instead of their eyes. We pass out eye masks, turn out the lights, and take sounds from all over the world and move them around the audience using a ring of eight loudspeakers – the Clair Brothers kiTCURVE12+. All these sounds will swirl around you while you sit in total darkness with only your ears to guide you.”
To recreate sounds as diverse as bridges creaking, ants marching and mud pots gurgling to historic street sounds of Berlin, musical performances by a washing machine, and the creepy howls one hears while crossing the Gobi Desert, requires talent, showmanship and the right gear.
Harnett offers some background: “Working in public radio news, our job is to produce stories using words and sounds, basically just presenting information with a hook or a pretty package, which can become stale after a while. So, in 2015 we came up with an idea to create a show that is all about sound instead of language and narrative, a show that gets into long stretches of sounds with extreme depth, without narration, so you can really lose yourself.
The venue size for the show shouldn’t be too gigantic or too minuscule, and the optimal crowd size is 120 people. The most important aspect of this show is the intricate and subtle dynamism of the sound as it travels across the eight loudspeakers; if they’re too far apart, the sound will “jump” from one speaker to the next, disrupting the smooth seamless nature of the intended experience. Harnett adds: “All-in-all, people are enjoying it. We’ve pretty much sold out every venue we’ve done.”
Having previously used speakers from another high-end manufacturer on the West Coast, Chris and Sam were turned on to Clair Brothers by some of their Bay Area audiophile peers, who spoke highly of the brand and their great sounding products. “When we started planning our East Coast tour, there was no question we would reach out to Clair Brothers. Fortunately for us, they were immediately interested in collaborating. Even more fortunately, the Clair Brothers system far exceeded our hopes and expectations.” says Hoff.
(Jim Evans)
