The first time I heard KTL’s music, I was in my car driving on the highway. In trying to get a sense of the group, I tried blasting their 2007 release KTL 2 on my car stereo but all I heard was noise — wind ripping against metal and glass, and rubber spinning hot against asphalt. Or so I thought. It soon dawned on me that the album’s opening track “Game” was actually meshing with the world flying by and informing the sound in my head.

“You’re pretty fortunate nowadays to have the opportunity to listen to something in complete isolation with no environmental noise,” Stephen O’Malley, one half of KTL tells me from his seat in a Paris Metro car, as I struggle to make out his cellphone voice, blocking out the din of his fellow passengers. “A lot of people don’t have the chance to do that, including me as a player. I really like the fact that you can blend the environment with the music being played. Whether it’s the highway when you’re driving with it or, when you’re playing alongside a fog machine’s noise, other sounds happening in the theatre piece, engines operating the prop devices — it’s interesting. Music is just a reflection of natural sound structured by the human mind into a pleasant sculpture but incorporating incidental noise into your music is a nice surprise a lot of the time.”

Consisting of American-born guitarist O’Malley —?of drone metal duo Sunn O))) — and Vienna-based electronic audio manipulator Peter Rehberg of Pita, the ambient duo KTL began in 2007, as players in a theatrical production entitled Kindertotenlieder created and directed for European stages (so far) by Gisèle Vienne, and written by Los Angeles–based writer Dennis Cooper. KTL portrayed a live band in the plot, while also providing the soundtrack for the action, and the concept has worked well for all involved.

Happenstance has been part of KTL’s framework since the group’s inception, which itself was a lucky break according to O’Malley. When he and Rehberg accepted their roles in Kindertotenlieder, the noted improvisers in experimental drone and doom music encountered a structured script and external direction, forcing them to negotiate their impulses with the task at hand.

“Gisèle Vienne, she basically invented our band for us,” O’Malley says of the director. “Peter and I had played together — he’d played in Sunn O))) before, live — but this band is in the script, performing with the theatre piece every time it plays. People who see the band live separately and then with the theatre piece, they’re surprised by how different it is. We’re really working from a script with the theatre piece, whereas the concert side of things is more experimental.”

KTL’s configuration is unusual, though not by new music standards. O’Malley plays guitar with minimal effects, generating two sonic personalities with what he calls “robot guitars,” which enable him to accompany himself. His output is processed and augmented by Rehberg who uses a computer to manipulate the sounds that KTL creates before releasing them into the air. “It’s surprisingly musical considering how harsh and abstract it is,” O’Malley says. “There’s a lot of melody in it and it’s exciting to find your way through a set and discover those things.”

The flipside of my initial confusion with KTL 2 is that O’Malley isn’t certain working in the studio really captures what this group is about. Even besides the fact that KTL 2 was made in early 2007, O’Malley believes that it can only serve as the first rough sketches of KTL as an entity, whereas the live setting reveals both their essence and where they’re at right now.

Though confident with KTL, O’Malley is aware of a backlash brewing as he brings the duo to North American Sunn O))) followers for the first time. “There are fans of my music who get a little too critical when I try other things,” he laughs. “Like, [people who think] ‘I’ve been there since 2004 and my opinion matters and what you’re doing is bullshit now.’ It’s totally not a ‘this or that’ thing for me and it’s hard [for them] to understand.

I hope people are into it in Toronto. I had a great time there with Sunn O))) and Peter has his whole audience as well, which is just like a lot of mutants. It’s cool and I appreciate that.”