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 (Rabid/etcetc)
The Knife unveil a Darwinian masterpiece
As much as The Knife’s sonic textures and production techniques have changed as their work has progressed, at no stage has their music been mistakable for anyone else’s. Despite this well-known fact, listeners will undoubtedly be taken aback by the sheer strangeness of The Knife’s latest project with Berliners Mt. Sims and Planningtorock, the soundtrack for an experimental opera about the life of Charles Darwin titled Tomorrow, In A Year. The introductory track to the first disc opens with a series of high-pitched digital glitches – you’d be forgiven for thinking you had a faulty pressing – before these arrange themselves into something approaching the calls of insects in what sounds like an homage to Throbbing Gristle’s early track Walkabout. Things get weirder: Epochs layers operatic vocals (courtesy of mezzo-soprano Kristina Wahlin Momme) over woozy, disorienting blasts of noise; the libretto itself is composed from fragments of Darwin’s journals, both revealing and concealing his inner life (Ebb Tide Explorer makes explicit Darwin’s scientific method: “Examine, examine, examine / Frame of mind, frame of mind / In following, in following / Changes, changes”). While the first disc remains relentlessly experimental, to the point of aggression against the listener in Variation Of Birds, the second moves to wards more familiar songwriting territory, mirroring Darwin’s own return to England after his sole voyage on the Beagle. Towards that disc’s conclusion, on the brilliant Colouring Of Pigeons, we finally hear the voice of The Knife’s Karin Dreijer Andersson: “The delight of once again being home,” she sings, and she really means it. What The Knife have done with their collaborators on this project is to render the uncanny homely, and the heimlich unheimlich. Tomorrow, In A Year is a remarkably difficult listen, but it’s also, to my mind, the most rewarding release of the year thus far.
*****
CHAD PARKHILL
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