KNIFE - Tomorrow, In A Year

There's a far more ambitious project than usual behind the new album by the mysterious Swedish duo known as The Knife. Nothing less than an opera - though not an opera in the lyrical sense, but rather an "electro-opera", commissioned from the Dreijer siblings by the Danish experimental collective Hotel Pro Forma. Mind you, this isn't simply a soundtrack. The Knife are the librettists of the entire opera, working independently of the theatre company and in turn bringing in two well-known names from German electro: Matthew Sims (Mount Sims) and Janine Rostron (Planningtorock - who should be releasing a new record on DFA Records soon). Carte blanche, then, for The Knife, who find themselves handling a subject as unfamiliar as it is difficult: Charles Darwin.

"Tomorrow, In A Year" is a musical biography, from which a theatrical performance takes shape centred on one of the most important and controversial figures in science. The Knife know nothing about opera, nor about Darwin. They read his diaries, travel to the Amazon to hear the sounds Darwin is likely to have heard during his research, and learn about the man's philosophy as well as his personal story. All of this is set to music over an 18-month process, to be performed by three unlikely figures: Kristina Wahlin, a professional mezzo-soprano, Jonathan Johansson, a pop singer of some fame in Sweden, and Laerke Winther, the lead actress in the opera (the minor vocal parts are performed by Karin Dreijer, Planningtorock and Mount Sims).

The result can be split into two parts, neatly separated by cd1 and cd2. The first is pure avant-garde, verging on experimental lyricism. Whalin's vocal virtuosity speaks of minerals and geological eras over a sonic fabric as dark, violent and dissonant as the movement of lava in the earth's evolution. "Upheaved" opens with a deranged bel canto, soon smothered by dark, dissonant keyboards, while "Variation Of Birds" is a high-pitched drone that mutates into a runaway oscillator, until the choral melody arrives, surrounded by the wild cries of Amazonian birds. The voices of men, animals and machines blend completely into one another to create something entirely new (with the soprano's melody mimicking a bird in flight) that perhaps only recalls "Tilt" by Scott Walker. "Letter To Henslow" follows the same path, with jungle sounds acting out a hypothetical ornithological version of "Einstein on The Beach", as does the naturalistic-instrumental noise of "Scoal Swarm Orchestra". Also notable is "Ebb Tide Explorer" (exceptionally performed by Johannsson), where field recordings merge with machines and obsessive chants of dreams and ghosts.

The second disc sets aside the thornier moments to give more room to electronics and rhythm, likely satisfying those looking for the sound of Knife's "Silent Shout". "Annie's Box", which recounts the tragic death of Darwin's daughter through a solemn suite driven by cello, also appears in an alternate version, sung by a Karin in a state of grace who completely overturns the track's atmosphere, bringing it closer to what we've recently heard from the Fever Ray project.

The percussion work on the title track and on "Seeds" — effectively a techno track — is interesting, but the single chosen to introduce the album, "The Colouring Of Pigeon", comes across as labored and hard to digest, like every other time "lightweight" artists have tried, fruitlessly, to edge closer to opera. The result is a muddle of "Silent Shout" and low-grade operatic references, lacking structure and regurgitated into a context too different for it not to end up tedious. It redeems itself only with "The Height Of Summer", the true single of this album, branded with Knife's rubbery percussion and a killer chorus: "How is Charles/ I haven't heard from him in a long long time/ A thousand years seems to pass/ So quickly". Through the Dreijers' music, Darwin appears not as the godfather of cruel evolutionism, but as a champion of diversity and non-hierarchical variation: the genetic anomaly that evolves the species, just like the brilliant anomaly of Knife's music.

As Olof Dreijer has stated, their complete ignorance of the operatic world is lifeblood for Knife, who approach it for the first time in an instinctive, spontaneous way: the refinement and experimentation here are not stylistic exercises but genuine avant-garde, full of meaning. It would be worth seeing "Tomorrow, In A Year" live to understand how Ralf Richardt Strøbech and Kirsten Dehlholm staged Knife's electronics teetering on the edge of the abyss, though the performance videos on Hotel Pro Forma's YouTube channel reveal a great deal (the choice of Hiroaki Umeda's style for the choreography is spot-on: jagged butoh/street dance deeply tied to the stroboscopic interplay of lights).

It's hard to say whether Knife's respectless approach has made an impression on the world of contemporary opera, but outside that world "ordinary" listeners are left with two choices: (a) arm themselves with headphones and patience and listen closely to cd1 until they realize Knife are a decade ahead of their time; or (b) listen to cd2, skipping a few tracks, and settle for something that at best is a compromise, and in any case inferior to the Dreijers' previous work.

The choice is yours (it's worth remembering that the whole album is available to stream for free); my final verdict is nothing more than an average between 8 and 6.

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15/03/2010