Kaninchen

Emanating feelings of utter and ultimate grief, Kaninchen delves in the deepest parts of human despondency and brings it to life with overwhelmingly devastating beauty. An assortment of spoken word and simple acoustic melodies, the duo, consisting of Craig Taylor-Broad and Chris Trevena, presents raw, visceral bits of being with a torturous longing; redolent of those moments of laying in bed in the dark with loneliness and reality creeping in, reminding you of your abandoned and forlorn existence.

Accordingly, their records were recorded in solitary places of reflection (whether they meant to or not) such as a Taylor-Broad’s bedroom, Trevena’s bathroom and an abandoned building.

“All the newer stuff is recorded using one mic in my bathroom, and most of it is recorded in a couple of takes if not first take,” Taylor-Broad explains. “That’s probably why it’s so lo fi.”

Though their work undeniably calls to sentiments we have all experienced, Taylor-Broad does not create in order to resonate with an audience.

“If people want to listen then that’s cool, I love that, but ultimately the best moments I’ve had with Kaninchen are when I play Chris a song for the first time and he applauds it because he thinks it’s brilliant. Kaninchen to me is a document of our experience of the time, and hopefully we will find an audience who admire that honesty.”

When the pair released their first EP, The Infinite Sad, they hadn’t expected people to listen, but after receiving an overwhelming response, they pushed on. 

 “From here on in, I just want to keep creating, if people are willing to listen, I’d love to start playing wherever they will have us,” explains Taylor-Broad.

Trevena continues, “Yeah, just to be able to travel and play in front of people who may or may not have heard of us. Music as an art form feels as if it is the most travel-friendly endeavour to enrol upon, which is my current passion; and to be able to tour for a interlude of time would be enough for me to be completely satisfied with the work we’ve currently produced and rehearsed.”

Kaninchen took off unexpectedly, but organically in such a way to produce such reflective, real compositions that could only have been determined by the cosmos. The pair explain how they came to be:

“I was interested in filming for a brief period of time, and began to talk to Craig about creating videos for his poetry,” Trevena says. “We found various derelict locations in and around the town we both lived in at the time and took the discovered locations for our own to produce films that we felt was appropriate for the literacy content. Hind-sight definitely displays the beginnings of the great audio depression, and we’re a year into it.”

Taylor-Broad explains, “Kaninchen came about in a really natural way. I used to play bass guitar in many bands but became sick of the whole thing and ended up not doing anything for a long time. By the time I wanted to do something again, I wanted to do something that I hadn’t done before and was desperate to create a band that would involve spoken word vocals into their music. Sadly, no one wanted to make a band with me, so I picked up an acoustic guitar and started teaching myself. A few months after that, I showed Chris a couple of songs and Kaninchen was born.”

Inspired ultimately by a corpus of gathered sounds from their surroundings, Kaninchen is spurred by a sundry of sources.

“I think Broke Up set a standard where we will pad out music with sounds, and I think inspiration comes from the everyday noises we hear,” Taylor-Broad says. “Obviously it would be daft to say that we aren’t influenced by bands, but I don’t think we set out to sound like a set of bands, or a certain genre. I’d like to think it’s all quite natural.”

He goes on, “Film, for me, lyrically at least, is probably my biggest influence though. The Infinite Sad was influenced by a film called The Future and Nightmare which was influenced by Eraserhead; so for me, the words are the most unnatural part of the whole process because I feel like I’m ripping off someone else’s ideas.”

Trevena’s process, though similar, takes a more introspective approach: “I try and open my ears to as much music as possible. I have an intense fascination with sounds that I haven’t heard from, whether it’s from instruments, sound manipulation or via the personal body. Aside from the resonance of sound, the mood it generates is an additional fascination. I’ve been researching Binaural Beats over the past few weeks, although it hasn’t officially been confirmed nor denied its attributions to emotional manipulation by the releasing/receiving of chemicals in the Limbic systems. The hypothesis that varying groups of frequencies can override our current emotional patterns is a topic that I want to dig into further to try, understanding how I can utilize these specific frequencies in pieces of sound to implant the emotional response that I deem suitable for the item of work that has been exported into the world.”

What moves Trevena the most are live performances, allowing him to lose himself in an all-encompassing sensation.

“Live performances allows me to forget anything and everything that is currently happening, and for the duration of someone making a singular or multiple sounds that penetrates through and takes over the central nervous system, high-lights all senses available and places me into an experience that deserves to be remembered whenever, if ever clouds form overhead, casting out the rays of appreciation and replacing them with self-deprecation. Some people remember the warm droplets of water as it cleansed their skin in aid of feeling less cold waiting in the wind and rain for their future travels, I try and re-emulate the rush of seeing a singular or group of performers when I’m under the weather.”

However, as much as they take from their milieu and already crafted works, there is no pleasing everyone as Taylor-Broad explicates:

“Every time the guitar playing steps up, or the production gets better, or the image behind the band improves, there will always be someone who says, ‘I like the old songs you made.’ And on the flip side, there will always be someone who says, ‘I don’t get spoken word,’ without even listening. It’s been a tough learning curve to leave all that aside and just concentrate on doing our thing.”

In terms of inspiring change, Trevena says:

“It’s too subjective to define, the impact of a difference begins with the initial acknowledgement of your existence upon another’s, and that alone is wonderful and under-valued; for us to be able to communicate as a species in forms of language is an aspect we’re all aligned to, but to make sounds presenting emotions, thoughts and ideas without the sounds of vocal chords marrying together and separating is indescribable. It’s an experience, it’s company, it’s understanding and therefore therapeutic. I feel that with Kaninchen, [Taylor-Broad’s] writing explores boundaries of life that we all can exist in, however, high-lighting micro-elements as well as the overbearing plights of existence that we rather not experience, by pushing these situations into the fore-front of people’s attention, I feel that it is eligible for self-reflection and to step back, interpret and re-evaluate similar occurrences and understand them better as a result. To make a meaningful difference is to make people think.”

Something interesting that no one else knows?
“I like to be in the foetal position as much as possible,” Trevena dilvulges. “If there is a chance going that I can lay upon a floor, chair, where-ever, I will try and take it. But I don’t like to do it in-front of people I know because the thought of it gets me nervous and I feel like I’m sweating vernix, the world turns into a slippy place without any signs to identify that fact. When I fall, I fall hard.”

And yet somehow unsurprisingly, he says, “There is hope.” However bleak, there is always just a glimmer of hope with these two.

Kaninchen just released their new single, “Nightmare,” March 2^nd with a video in the works. Their goal is to tour and just have people buy their records.