Returning in 2025 after a celebrated debut, the enchanting Late Night Orchestra is back, re-imagining the sultry 1990s sounds of influential UK trio Massive Attack. Bringing together some of Australia’s finest musicians, this extraordinary ensemble will be paying homage to the legacy of Massive Attack and the Trip Hop era.

We caught up with Australia’s darling Katie Noonan for a chat about the show and what she loves about one of the most influential bands of the trip-hop era. Katie will be performing alongside Adrian Eagle, Thandi Phoenix, and THNDO to bring a spectacular show to venues around the country this August. 

What drew you to be part of the Late Night Orchestra and perform Massive Attack’s music
in this unique setting?
The album Mezzanine and the British trip hop movement was a huge influence on me in the mid
– late 90’s as I was emerging into adulthood and learning to find my place in the world as a
singer songwriter. I clearly remember the first time I heard “Teardrop” and saw that
extraordinary video and fell in love with Elizabeth Fraser’s voice and the sonic world of the band.

How do you approach reinterpreting such iconic songs while staying true to their essence?
It’s always a delicate balance as this is not a tribute show – this concert features 4 integrous
artists who have their own unique vocal styles and colours, so for want of a better word it will be
a ‘reimagining’ of these iconic tunes with a truly awesome band and string section.

 Massive Attack’s music is known for its deep emotional impact. Is there a particular song in
the setlist that resonates with you personally?
When the idea of the gig came up, I put up my hand for “Teardrop” straight away and bagsed it
(!) ,as I absolutely love that song, I love Elizabeth’s voice and I had recently found out that she
recorded the vocal on the day her former lover Jeff Buckley died. So in this one song are 3 major
influences – Elizabeth and Jeff’s voices and the beautiful lush sounds of Massive Attack.

Can you tell us about the experience of performing with a 12-piece orchestra? How does it
differ from other live performances you’ve done?
There is something truly magical about being part of a larger ensemble where every heart is set
on creating a beautiful combined chamber sound. I am a huge fan of THNDO, Adrian and Thandi,
and my elixir band mate Ben Hauptmann will be on guitars so it will be a beautiful vibe amongst
friends old and new.

 Trip-hop blends various genres—jazz, electronica, soul. How do you incorporate your own
vocal style into this genre?
My style is just me being me – my obsession has always been about sounding like no one else
and focusing on integrity and honesty in my music and my voice. My classical bel-canto
technique transfers into all my various musical meanderings and this will be no different. One
thing I love about this trip hop movement is the gentle intimacy of the vocals – I don’t have a big
sound and I love that I can sit in that quite part of my voice and focus on the emotional delivery
and enjoy singing mezzopiano.

 The Late Night Orchestra is described as the “ultimate house band for the greatest afterparty
that never existed.” How does that energy translate into the live performance?
Ohhhh unfortunately I missed the last season so I am excited to discover this space, and I know it
will be an amazing experience to play these songs from such an integral embryonic part of my
musical life.

What do you hope audiences take away from this reimagining of Massive Attack’s music?
A chance to go back to a time when there was a LOT of really awesome new music being made –
it was a time of bravery, being unique and creating new sound worlds – it was super inspiring to
be a teenager/young adult muso in these times. Particularly in the UK there was a plethora of
amazing bands doing cool stuff I loved – Massive Attack Portishead, Radiohead, Bjork, Tricky,
Zero Seven, Nitin Sawney…all of these artist were super inspiring to me.

This show celebrates the legacy of trip-hop. How has the genre or Massive Attack
influenced your own musical journey?
Enormously – my brother was living in the UK around this time and was gigging and DJ-ing a lot,
and when he came back to Australia in 1996 we formed our band ‘george’ together, so he
brought a lot of that UK influence to the table for myself and the band to learn from.

With performances lined up across multiple cities, do you think each audience will bring a
different vibe? How do you feed off the crowd’s energy during a show?
The energy of every member of the audience effects every gig. Artists are nothing without the
audience and it is that beautiful exchange of energy that makes concerts so profound and
special, and something that no matter how advanced AI or the digital /virtual world gets, will
never be recreated other than from human to human in shared synergy.
I am obviously a hippy from way back, but I genuinely believe musicians, and in particular
singers , are portals for light and energy that connect us with the otherworldly ether we are all
floating in – on and off the stage

TDIQ begins in a disused shopping centre, and leads participants to multiple sites across Footscray, giving audiences an interactive, groundbreaking psychological experience of psychosis through cross reality (XR) technologies.

TDIQ is the brainchild of producer Troy Rainbow, who created the show based on his real-life experiences living with mental illness: The Door In Question comes from a deeply personal place. My mother had a diagnosis of schizophrenia, so the show aims to demonstrate how love can be expressed in a very fragmented state. The narratives are a combination of childhood experience and written notes, including remarkable birthday presents and cards I received from my mother. The VR content is an illustration of a childhood story she wrote for me. I hope audiences can come away from the work with a greater understanding of the impact of living within an unreliable world.

Q1. The Door in Question has been described as immersive and intentionally disorienting. What inspired you to create something so bold and unconventional?
Disorientation is the point.

Mental illness, especially psychosis, doesn’t unfold neatly. It loops, collapses, repeats. I didn’t want to portray madness from the outside, I wanted to collapse the observer’s distance. A lot of media invite us to watch someone unravel. I wanted people to feel it. To be implicated. The work’s immersive not to overwhelm, but to echo how psychosis actually feels: shifting, omnidirectional, logical in the moment, terrifying in hindsight. It’s a black box: you throw memories in and see what comes out changed.

Q2. This project is rooted in your personal experiences, particularly your relationship with your mother. How did her story shape the emotional tone and direction of the work?
Mum’s story is the emotional spine of the piece. Her schizophrenia shaped my entire understanding of language, love, perception. Her birthday cards would start with a normal message, then spiral – literally spiral, words wrapped around the paper’s edges – into pigeons, poisoned water, and conspiracies about our family being “inhuman.”
After she died, we found hundreds of these writings in her flat, beautiful, chaotic, terrifying. Pain pressed into every page. The work asks: What does love look like from within schizophrenia? The answer’s deeply bizarre, but also tender, intelligent, and, at times, incandescent.

Q3. You mention using VR and XR technologies to simulate aspects of psychosis. How did you ensure this experience remained respectful and truthful, rather than exploitative or sensational?
Psychosis is often flattened into horror tropes or danger narratives. I’ve lived with the reality. It’s terrifying, but not in the ways it’s usually depicted. It’s not about what you see, but what those visions mean to you.
I worked with psychologists and used my own experience to scaffold this. XR allows us to fragment perspective: first-person, second-person, god’s eye. You’re not watching; you’re inside the delusion. That’s what psychosis feels like: being handed a breath pattern and believing it’s sacred. It’s not spectacle, it’s entanglement.

Q4. What was it like turning deeply personal memories—like your mother’s birthday cards and stories—into public, performative experiences? Did you find it a healing experience or triggering?
Both. Definitely both. Translating those memories, her spiralling letters, her salvaged gifts of rubbish, into something public means revisiting a grief that never quite resolves. There’s beauty in her logic, if you learn to read it.
But it’s a heavy thing to carry. Some days, working on this is cathartic. Others, it’s paralysing. Like standing behind a cave wall, knowing what’s on the other side but not ready to face it. Healing doesn’t mean closure. It means keeping the door ajar.

Q5. One of the goals of the show is to destigmatise mental illness. What has the audience response been like in previous showings, and have there been any reactions that stayed with you? Do you think there is enough conversation about mental health or is it still stigmatised?
Psychosis is still the unspoken edge of mental health discourse. People will talk about anxiety, maybe depression, but psychosis? That’s where the conversation stops.
After shows, people often say, “I need a week to process this.” For me that’s the highest praise, it means they didn’t just understand, they felt something. One man told me it reminded him of his sister’s breakdown – he hadn’t known how to talk about it before.
There’s progress, but we’re not there yet. This show doesn’t preach. It opens a door and says: Come in. It’s weird in here. But it’s not wrong.

Q6. What can audiences expect from the experience? Do you hope they will understand a bit more about schizophrenia and its impact?
They can expect to get lost. Genuinely. The piece asks you to step into someone else’s logic. You’ll be followed. Or think you’re doing the following. You’ll get a phone call that might be from yourself.
But they’ll also find levity. Grace. Moments of uncomfortable laughter. Schizophrenia isn’t one-note. It’s messy, painful, ecstatic, mundane. I hope people come out a little less afraid of madness, a little more curious about what it’s like to believe in something no one else sees.

Q7. You collaborated with institutions like UNSW, RMIT, and various arts councils. What role did these partnerships play in shaping the final production?
These partnerships were crucial. UNSW provided academic scaffolding, especially around ethics and the use of technology in research-based art. RMIT offered access to tech and performance networks, which shaped our staging. The arts councils gave us space to take creative risks without needing to water down the content.
But more than anything, they gave legitimacy to a project that could easily be seen as too weird or too raw. They backed a piece that doesn’t resolve neatly, and that trust gave us room to make something truthful.

Q8. This work straddles both personal narrative and social commentary. How do you balance those two elements when writing and producing?
They’re interwoven. The personal is political. The way my mother was treated, by hospitals, welfare, and housing, wasn’t just personal tragedy, it was systemic neglect. But I don’t want to write a lecture.
The work invites people into a sensory experience first. The social critique is embedded in the architecture. You feel the weight of being surveilled. The dread of being misunderstood. The ache of being too loud, or too silent. The commentary emerges through the experience itself.

Q9. What was the most challenging part of bringing this project to life—creatively, technically, or emotionally?
Emotionally, it was revisiting the grief in real time. Creatively, it was resisting the urge to tidy things up. Letting the experience stay strange, unresolved, contradictory – that was hard but necessary.
Technically? Making live performance, VR, AI voice cloning, and spatial sound all work together without frying someone’s brain. There were nights where we genuinely thought the tech was possessed.

Q10. What do you hope people take away from The Door in Question, and how do you hope it changes public conversations around mental illness?
I want them to walk out changed but not alienated. I want them to pause next time they hear someone muttering on the tram, and think: What if what they’re saying makes perfect sense, if you knew their story?

This is the children’s book my mother once asked me to illustrate. Her stories never made it to the shelves. So I made this. It’s strange. It’s difficult. But it’s full of love. I just had to learn how to read it first.

THE DOOR IN QUESTION will play at various locations throughout Footscray from 8 to 18 May, as part of after-dark music and arts festival, SLEEPLESS FESTIVAL. The festival is set to take over Melbourne’s inner west this May with a vibrant showcase of music, performance, art and installation.

For tickets and more information visit www.sleeplessfestival.com.