Music
09 May 06

Blade to grey

Gone are the booming synths and melodic choruses. Instead, techno darlings The Knife have embraced their gothic side. But why are they dressed as birds?

Talk about a transformation. When Swedish brother and sister act The Knife released their last album, Deep Cuts, in 2004, they were making smart, socially-aware but somewhat disposable electro pop.
Admittedly, the record featured, in its original form, ‘Heartbeats’, the song that Swedish folk singer Jose Gonzalez covered and enjoyed a worldwide hit with. Nevertheless, nothing could prepare Karin and Olof Dreijer’s fans for their new album, Silent Shout.
Gone are the catchy hooks and daft gym gear, replaced by crow masks, flirtations with black magic, an interest in pagan spiritualism and an album’s worth of the darkest, deepest Gothic techno.
It’s possible to trace The Knife’s transition to the first recording sessions for the album, which took place in a 13th century church in central Stockholm. There, as Olof explains they “ended up in a dungeon, three levels underground”.
“We were trying to save money on rent because hiring studios is so expensive in Sweden,” he says. “We were recording by candlelight and it set the tone for the album. We tried to create a separate world, but then the place fell apart.”
Silent Shout certainly sounds like an album created amidst strife, upheaval and unhappiness – Karin sings that she is ‘dancing for dollars’ on the sombre synths of ‘Neverland’.
Elsewhere, there’s the brutal electro-bass of ‘We Share Our Mother’s Health’ and the understated ‘One Hit’, which refers to the Corleone family.
This uneasiness at the core of Silent Shout could be attributed to the fact that Karin and Olof didn’t have a close relationship until they started making music together seven years ago.
“Karin is six years older than me and left home when I was 11, so we never hung out,” Olof explains. “In Sweden, the concept of the traditional family is not as important as it is in, for instance, Italy. Although we argue a lot and are both planning solo works after this LP is released, we make up and continue working together because we are related. Otherwise, The Knife would not have survived.”
Apart from their uneasy relationship, one of the other big influences on Silent Shout is trance, in its modern, German techno form.
“I got into techno through trance and was a techno purist for years,” Olof says. “Much of what The Knife do is not dance music, it is inspired by the sounds that Jeff Mills and Richie Hawtin make when they produce ambient. Their work is cold and calm and has this strange tension which I find interesting, but more recently, I’m listening to producers like Gabriel Ananda. The Nathan Fake album is great, too.”
In the same way that modern techno producer Ananda thinks about plants when he’s working or Domink Eulberg yearns to be a forest ranger, Olof claims that ‘Forest Families’ and the jacking yet dreamy ‘Like A Pen’ were inspired by the nature around them in Sweden.
“I love the fragile, natural sounds that you find in trance and ambient. It’s almost like a new age sound,” Olof declares. “I thought of enormous snow fields in the north of Sweden when we composed the pads and strings for these tracks. It’s good to combine nature and techno, without sounding like Enya.”
Given their penchant for dressing up as birds, are The Knife going to follow the same route as countless other Scandinavian rock and pop acts and succumb to that ancient Norse tradition of devil worship?
“We both find the occult fascinating – it was an influence on some of the songs. But don’t worry, we’re not going to start practising black magic yet. Maybe we’ll wait until the next album,” Olof cackles.
After all, the devil has all the best tunes…