I’m really excited to announce that there will be six new productions of Kill Climate Deniers this year, in six different cities.

Sydney University Drama Society – 11-21 March, Sydney

Monash University Student Theatre – May, Melbourne

io Productions – July, Launceston, Tasmania

Canal Cafe Theatre – October, London

Švandovo divadlo – July-December, Prague

Canberra (secret) – July, Canberra

These are all badass companies and makers and I’m excited about each and every one of them. If you’re in any of these cities: GO CHECK IT OUT.

It’s hard for me to judge, but six new shows feels like a lot – it’s certainly more productions of a new script than I’ve ever had before. 

As much as I want to claim all the credit for having written a brilliant play*, it seems to me that this burst of new productions is a consequence of 2020. Everything caught fire. My parents nearly lost their home. We were treated to the pathetic performance of politicians gleefully shilling for fossil fuel interests even as thousands of people (my best friends!) were evacuating from their homes. We are staring down the sheer nihilism of a political system willing to condemn future generations to an uncertain existence on a degraded biosphere. 

Fuck those guys. I’ve never felt it more urgently and fiercely.

Theatre, of course, doesn’t change the world. Theatre can’t even change people’s minds. (This show, I promise, is not ‘reaching across the aisle’ to convert anyone.) But what theatre can do is gather a group of people together in a room and provide space to reflect and share. And that’s not nothing.

In conversations with the six companies producing the show, each of them has expressed that producing this play is not just about the end result on stage – it’s also about the conversations they’re having in rehearsals, the fundraisers they’re holding for climate charities, the activism they’re undertaking alongside the work… It feels like putting on this show is an excuse for organising and gathering forces, making good things happen in the world.

So I’m excited and proud and excited and scared and excited. 


*I’m very proud of the script, I won’t lie

‘By 1991 this underground sound was assaulting the mainstream pop charts. Despite virtually no radio play, the rave scene hurled anthem after anthem into the Top 20. With its raw futurism, coded lingo and blatant drug references, this hardcore rave music was as shocking and alienating to outsiders as punk had been.’
– Simon Reynolds ‘Generation Ecstacy’

DAVID: I wrote Kill Climate Deniers at the same time as chewing through ‘Generation Ecstacy’, Simon Reynolds account of the early rave era, the rise of Chicago House and Detroit Techno, and the subsequent explosion of those genres into a whole subculture of music, fashion, dancing and drugs.

It happens that the rise of House and Techno in the late 80s / early 90s coincides exactly with the emerging public awareness of what was first known as the Greenhouse Effect, then Global Warming – what we now call climate change – and the appearance of the climate denial movement in opposition to efforts to counter it.

Coincidence or otherwise, Kill Climate Deniers was written to the tune of some classic hits from the early rave era. Here is a small selection of some of the most potent bangers that fuelled the creation of the show.

Shut Up And Dance – Raving I’m Raving (1992)
DAVID: I love that this got to #2 in the charts, more or less a few weeks after Marc Cohn’s Walking in Memphis came out, before the lawyers got involved. It’s such a blatant, flagrant fuck you kinda theft. I would, yes I would, lose my shit if this were played out on a dancefloor here and now. ‘But do I really feel the way I feel?’

New Order – Confusion (Pump Panel Reconstruction Mix) (1995)
REUBEN: Yes it’s *that* acid techno riff, made famous by its appearance in the 1998 film Blade, and by Public Domain’s “Bass In The Place” version. I reckon this version is far superior though, due to its relentless repetition and punishing length. My working title for the album track “w3 w3lcome the future” was jokingly “Cyber Leather” – evidence that those Blade/Matrix aesthetics and big distorted kick drums have been stuck in the back of my head since my teens.

Inner City – Big Fun (1986)
DAVID: This came out in 1986 in Detroit, then became a massive smash hit in the UK two years later. I just feel a lot of feelings listening to this.

Black Box – I Don’t Know Anybody Else (1990)
REUBEN: Like their first single Ride On Time, the title is based on a misheard lyric and the vocal sample led to legal troubles. I recently found this single on 7” so I’ve been enjoying it slowed down at 33rpm too. Ditto David’s comments on Ride On Time really – it just feels so good. The piano parts in Bolted are definitely an homage.

The Happy Mondays – Hallejulah (club remix) (1989)
DAVID: I’m a sucker for the rave piano any day of the week, and when those keys come in over that headnodding drumbeat, I cannot help but smile.

Paul van Dyk – For an Angel (1994)
REUBEN: The dense/sparse dynamic is equally as important as the loud/soft one. I dig that trance style where delay/echo effects on the synth lines gradually fill up all the space and create a kind of rhythmic glittering at the peak.

S-Express – Theme from S’Express (1988)
DAVID: ‘Enjoy this trip. Enjoy this trip. And it is a trip.’ This is just so cheap, so trashy, so careless, and equally so blazingly good. If you’re gonna have to shoot activists who are violently protesting for a greener planet (never say never), this is what you want playing on the stere.

Haddaway – What Is Love (1993)
REUBEN: The vocal, the bass, the staccato arpeggio, the organ – almost every element in this song is a hook! Furthermore they’re arranged in uncluttered fashion; each has it’s own time and space to shine before tagging out for the next hook to enter.

The Prodigy – Hyperspeed (G-Force Part 2) (1992)
DAVID: The Prodigy’s first album is a total rush, start to finish – all these surging highs and then sudden unexpected – but totally ideal – lurching changes of direction and speed. The way this track just climbs, plateaus, climbs, plateaus, again and again, and then finally, finally drops – hits me like nothing else.

2 Unlimited – No Limit (1993)
REUBEN: This track always makes me feel hyped, perhaps in large part due to the ~140 beats-per-minute tempo, especially if I’ve been listening to typical house music which usually sits at around 120bpm. That huge one-finger-on-the-keyboard synth riff is so wonderfully simple and bone-headed, like a pub-rock riff, I love it.

Black Box – Ride on Time (1989)
DAVID: The whole play was written in homage to this song. I feel like this is the reigning anthem for whatever nation I subscribe to. Nothing says euphoria to me like that incredible Italo-disco piano riff and Loleatta Holloway’s illegally sampled vocals – this makes me feel better about being a human and it makes me feel good about our future. And time won’t take my love away.

M.I.A. – Galang (2003)
REUBEN: This is the odd one out in this list, but it definitely fed into the rhythms of the track Music to Shoot Climate Activists To, which perhaps unsurprisingly is the odd one out on the album.

So we’d like to invite you to take part in the Kill Climate Deniers Listening Party next week.

This is a very special and also unusual event, and it’s also gonna be the best way to experience the Kill Climate Deniers album for the first time.

The idea is, basically: come to Parliament House in Canberra at around 1pm on Wednesday 31 August. There’s no exact start time – it’s up to you – but we’re calling it around 1pm for argument’s sake.

Bring a music-playing device (your phone, a walkman) and some headphones.

Before you come, download the special Listening Party version of the album from the Kill Climate Deniers website. (It’ll be available on the event page on Wednesday morning.)

If you don’t download it beforehand, you can stream it using the Parliament House free wifi (but we don’t know how capable that wifi is, so we’re recommending you come with it already on your phone).

Stand outside the entrance to Parliament House, put your headphones in, press play on track 1, and the rest will take care of itself!

The whole trip will take you around 35 minutes, and then, grab a cup of tea in the Parliament House cafe.

The album will be available following the Listening Party on iTunes, Spotify, through the Clan Analogue website and so on. The album will be magic – but the Listening Party is a strange special one-off and a chance to stroll around the most hated suburb in Australia in a whole different headspace.

NOTE: You’re gonna be walking around the public areas of Parliament House. It’s a secure facility, and you’ll be subject to the standard conditions of entry – check out aph.gov.au for more info.

image by Sarah Walker

Reuben Ingall. Pic by Sarah Walker.

1. How did you get involved in this project?

There’s a lot of musical references in the script, so I think Julian Hobba was looking for someone with a foot in both the sound-artist and DJ worlds. I’d worked on music and sound-design for dance and installations before, and David and I had been following each other’s work for many years, so he knew about my mashup-DJ schtick too. So I became the sound and music guy for the development.

2. What gave you the idea of turning Kill Climate Deniers into a radio-play / album?

The culmination of the development phase was a small showing of excerpts in which I performed a live mix of audio elements (music, foley, field recordings), and one audience member said they’d rested their eyes during some sections and still really enjoyed it. With little prospect of further funding on the horizon, a radio play seemed like a format that could potentially be quite fully-formed at a low cost. I’d recently been recording some writers reading their short stories for an e-publication. I did that at community radio station 2XX FM where I volunteer, so I had my head in that space too. Then it was David’s idea to push it in even more of a musical direction.

3. How did you go about writing these songs?

I often started out with a vague vision for a track, but each sonic choice influenced the next and I followed my nose entirely non-methodically. No particular element or aspect of a track was necessarily finished before moving on to the next. I’d constantly be moving my attention between writing a melodic part, tweaking the kick drum EQ, plotting out filter automation, building the overall arrangement (then knock-down-rebuilding), and so on.

4. What were your biggest musical inspirations from the era?

Although I was immersing myself in tracks from late-80s-early-90s, I think subconsciously the biggest influence was the kind of dance hits that were coming out around my peak Video-Hits watching years, from around 1997 (Sash, Darude, Faithless, etc).

5. How did the recording process work? What tools and/or processes did you use to record this album?

The voices were recorded over a couple of days in a studio at 2XX FM. I’m used to wrangling home-studio setups and that was my original thought, but it was great to have a bunch of good vocal mics in a nice quiet room all ready to go.

Constructing the music was quite different from my other practices in solo or mashup-DJ mode. I’m most practiced at manipulating recorded audio but with these tracks almost every element is sequenced. There’s some guitar and “aaaahhh” vocals in parts – that’s me, but I don’t own any synthesisers so for the most part the sounds came from old sample-packs.

Listening back, I notice I made heavy use of arpeggiators, they’re in almost every track actually.

I’ve realised one of my favourite things is the sound of an arp with a filter gradually opening up, or with its release time slowly ramping up.

6. In Canberra you played a kind of trial run of this show as part of the You Are Here Festival – what was that like?

It was fun! I love seeing David perform. There was a great audience response to both sides of the performance too – plenty of people dancing and soaking up the early-90s dance vibes.

7. What is your personal highlight off the KCD album?

It might be the breakbeat freakout with hoover-esque detuned saw synths at the end of Music To Shoot Climate Activists To. For this my production trick was to beatbox (actually yes) the basics of what I wanted into a mic along to a click track, then cut the Amen break and sequence the kicks and synths to fit those patterns.

 Reuben DJ-ing the Kill Climate Deniers gig in Canberra. Pic by Sarah Walker.

Marketing by Gabrielle Affleck

Web design by New Best Friend

Images by Sarah Walker

Album released through Clan Analogue

Short film by Tom and David Finnigan

Strategic consulting by Yolande Norris

Dramaturgy and editing by Julian Hobba

Illustrations by Gillian Schwab

With thanks to Peter Matheson, Adelina Larsson, Imogen Keane, Clare Moss, Cathy Petocz, Eleanor Garran, Miranda Borman, Emma Strand, Sarah Walker, Emma Hall, Rachel Roberts, Jordan Prosser, Steven McKinnon, Adrian Dodd, Sean Mullins, Tom Swann, Karmin Cooper, Brenna Hobson, Elly Clough, Ira Gamerman, Ginger Gorman, Mark Fletcher, Bernie Slater, Shane Breynard, Jack Lloyd, Nick McCorriston, Nick Wilson, Melanie Tait, Scott Bridges, Liam Cotchett, Natalie Reiss, Chris Finnigan, Vanessa Wright, Adelaide Rief, Caroline Stacey, John and Margaret Finnigan, and Emily Stewart.

Image by Sarah Walker.